


From concrete

by suzunofuu



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Car Accidents, Comfort/Angst, Confessions, Cuddling & Snuggling, First Kiss, Fluff, Happy Ending, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Injury, Losing each other, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Pro Volleyball Player Hinata Shouyou, Rehabilitation, Single Parents, Sleepy Cuddles, Slice of Life, Volleyball Dorks in Love, life gets in the way
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:01:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21584191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suzunofuu/pseuds/suzunofuu
Summary: Kageyama thinks he has everything he needs in life: new friends, a good team, a person he loves, a supportive mother, a career in what he loves doing the most in the world... But then, the day he's starting to step onto the path to make his dreams come true, he has an accident that shatters everything to pieces, even his own damn self.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Kageyama Tobio
Comments: 20
Kudos: 111





	1. Concrete (prologue)

First, there was everything.

The world had started to open for him to witness all types of wonders. All gates, all doors, all arms—everything was welcoming and ready to receive him. He had a new team he finally fit in, actual friends who wanted to stand by his side, an opportunity at what he loved doing most in the world and a special person in his life, even if he wasn’t keen to admit that just yet.

He had an amazing opportunity waiting for him not even a day away, a mother who supported his dreams and allowed him to seek them out, a friend that wanted to bid him farewell at the station the day he left, even when it was too early in the morning for the sun to be out or the streetlights to turn off.

He had a friend who insisted on walking him to the station, and Kageyama had watched him with awe as they walked—at Hinata's lips sucked into his mouth, at his hands fisted tight and then stretched out, then fisted again, and stretched out once more, avoiding his eyes as quickly as possible when they looked his way.

Hinata seemed more nervous than he was, but knowing him, he could only be feeling excitement, maybe a pang of healthy jealousy.

They stopped at the other side of the street, across from the station’s doors. Hinata turned around towards him, a little bit tired, a whole lot excited, probably saddened by the separation, too.

“Come back soon, yeah?” was all Hinata could say, all he could manage to mutter that wouldn't embarrass him to hell and back.

Kageyama nodded. He offered half a smile (an honest one) a smile that dropped as fast as it had appeared as he kept on staring Hinata's way. Kageyama couldn't take his eyes off Hinata—who was fidgeting way more than usual, who looked at him and blushed, who smiled almost forcefully yet somehow honest. Hinata, who was pretty without even meaning to, who did things to his stomach that couldn't be healthy, who could brighten anyone's day, above all his.

Kageyama stared at him, biting on the inside of his cheeks, his own hands clenching and unclenching nervously when their eyes stopped fucking around and met. They both bent towards each other at the same time, but while Kageyama moved in for a hug—he hadn't even _considered_ anything else—Hinata’s face went looking for his mouth.

Hinata didn't find his mouth. His lips pecked against his cheek instead, near his jaw. Kageyama sprung backwards at the unexpected touch, looking down at him with raised eyebrows and flushed cheeks, lips pressed tight. Hinata covered his mouth with both hands, as red as Kageyama had never seen him, and muffled against them:

“I'm sorry!”

Kageyama gaped for an interminable second, not knowing how to say that it was okay, that if he had known he wanted to kiss him, he probably would have let him. “It's– It's okay.”

Hinata stepped back, full on embarrassed, avoiding his eyes even though he was the only person there, the only goddamn thing Kageyama could stare at, mumbling, “I– I'll be going. You better come back stronger, you hear me?”, and then he was storming away, limbs as sticks and head hung low.

“Of course I will!” Kageyama shouted after Hinata. Then, to himself, so soft it felt strange and new to his tongue, “dumbass.”

Back then, before everything fell apart, he had everything; a friend who cherished his company and who he thought was special in all the good ways (only in his head, never out loud), was only one of the many things among them.

He had a long week of preparation for the training camp, a night out with his teammates before the day he left, an almost there kiss from the most special person he had in his life, a long ride on the train with his head full of questions and answers about volley, about his future, about Hinata.

And then the car hit him.

It hit him, his life relenting its motion until coming to a sudden stop. There was blackness, a sudden ephemeral light, his limbs and torso rolling through the floor. Blood, a screeching soundless beeping in his ears and a blinding pain, so blinding it went away a few milliseconds before his consciousness did. And then there was nothing.

There was nothing.

There was nothing.

There was nothing.


	2. A tall, tall wall

There’s a tall, tall wall between Hinata and Kageyama, a wall Kageyama has built between them, and Hinata has no idea how to fly past it to get to him.

He thought that in the future they’d have their own special wall between them, a wall both of them would try to surpass to get to the other side of the court; one both of them are more than familiar with. They could even face it together, forever bound to stand by each other’s side, the best duo combination the world has ever seen.

He thought he’d face this challenge with a smile, with Kageyama’s own little smirk nearby—either by his side or in front of him.

He can’t face this obstacle with a smile, though. He can’t face it at all.

Hinata doesn’t know how much he needs Kageyama until he can’t have him at all, until Kageyama has completely and irrevocably peeled Hinata off his life.

Sometimes, Hinata wishes he could blame Kageyama even a little, or hate him some, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He can’t hate Kageyama for being in pain, for needing space, for being so torn apart he doesn’t know which bit to hang on to first in hopes of not losing his whole self to the void.

Hinata doesn’t know how to bring Kageyama back. And hell, hasn’t he tried.

He’s used every one of his tricks, all of his knowledge and encouragement and comfort, every part of him, to try to bring the old Kageyama back, to try to lull the confused, angry new one back into his old self, fruitlessly. And Hinata understands. He understands it’s hard for Kageyama to accept reality. He knows it might feel like a nightmare, because it does so to him, and he’s not the one in Kageyama’s situation. He knows Kageyama is in pain, and that the pain is corrupting his every thought, his every decision, the way he perceives the world and the way he treats it. Hinata knows, and that doesn’t make it easier for him to accept it.

He’s tried everything to stay by Kageyama's side, but when Kageyama told him to stop, there was nothing else Hinata could do to keep them together.

When Kageyama’s eyes were still closed, it was simple for him to imagine him recovering, waking up and being okay—fine, just fine was enough—and coming back into their lives. It was easy to hope, almost a second-nature of his, an uncontrollable and primitive desire that piloted his life during the months Kageyama spent in the hospital.

It was easy for Hinata to hope for the best while Kageyama was asleep. After he woke up, Hinata had to face a reality he would have never had the guts to imagine, and maybe that’s why it’s so hard for him to accept it, because no matter what anyone did, their old Kageyama wasn’t going to come back.

* * *

No one knows about Kageyama's hospitalization until one month after the accident. His mom had been too worried about his health, the paperwork, the transportation from one hospital in Tokyo to another near home, to even remember she should call Kageyama's school and let them know about what had happened.

Hinata had tried to reach out to him on the phone to check how training camp was going, but hadn't thought much when Kageyama hadn’t answered, taking it as his usual self being a shy little shit who couldn't even pick up his phone. But then a month went by, the interhigh rolled past, and Kageyama was out of the map, nowhere to be found.

Kageyama didn't make it to nationals with them, but that didn't stop them from performing their very, very best.

If only they had known about him before the games, before it all, maybe the tables would have turned. Maybe they wouldn't have played at all. Maybe they wouldn’t have kept living their lives, even with Kageyama out of the map.

When they know about Kageyama’s hospitalization, the world comes to a stop. At least, Hinata’s does.

Hinata’s world stops, and it doesn’t seem like it will go back into motion.

Tobio’s mother is one hell of a strong woman. She keeps her composure while Kageyama's friends visit him in the hospital, while she explains about the crash, and the induced coma, and how badly it looks on the outside, even though they don't know if any permanent damage has been done in the inside, and that they shouldn't let worry overtake them.

She keeps her composure even as one of Kageyama's friends has a panic attack and has to be pulled out of the room so he can breathe. She knows that boy—not well, but she knows him. He’s the one Kageyama sometimes talks about, the one who sometimes walks Kageyama home and she can see through her studio's window as they wave each other goodbye. She knows the boy and how dearly his son thinks of him, and now knows that this kid, this mess of a boy with snot coming out of his nose and tears welling up at the corner of his eyes, hands gripping at the two seniors he has closer to him, cares about her Tobio as much as her Tobio cares for him.

Somehow deep inside her, she's glad to see Kageyama has friends who care this much about his wellbeing. The Kageyamas aren't a big family nor are they close to each other, and she knows how difficult it has been for Tobio to make friends at school, therefore for these kids she's glad.

She's glad and she's terrified. The way Tobio's face is more purple than its natural color, the way it looks bloody and scratched over and swollen, has filled her restless, soulless. Having someone that shares her worry and pain makes it easier to bear it, if only a little.

Hinata’s world comes to a stop when he knows about Kageyama’s accident, and it starts to dissolve into ashes when he sees him lying on the hospital bed, the cinder blocking his trachea, making it impossible for oxygen to make it into his lungs.

The first time Hinata sees Kageyama after the accident, he has a panic attack that makes his older teammates take him out of the hospital and to his house, where he hides in bed and allows himself to utterly break down, sobbing out the terror, the shock, the dismay. He shakes until his muscles ache, until he doesn’t have any more energy to worry about his friend, and passes out with his face pressed tight into the pillow, his body curled in on himself, fists gripping the blankets close to his chin.

Hinata spends one hell of a night after seeing Kageyama, but the next day he makes it a priority to visit him again, this time ready to see him, ready to accept whatever has happened, and plotting out the ways in which he’s going to help.

He goes to the hospital by himself, asking the team to allow him to go alone, since he needs a little space to take it all in. They accept after some pleading and insisting, without much conviction, and forcing him to accept to call if he’s too overwhelmed and needs help.

He _is_ overwhelmed when he sees Kageyama again. Not to the point of having a panic attack, but he is.

His limbs are wobbly when he gets to Kageyama’s bedside, eyes itching to glance away instead of ahead towards his friend. He can’t help the way his hand reaches out to press on Kageyama’s forehead, where he seems less bruised and bloody, where there’s actual skin uncovered, since everything else is hidden by bandages. He needs to touch Kageyama to assure himself this is real and not some sort of fucked up hallucination, or a ghost, or a dream. The Kageyama he touches is real. Heavily injured and real. His best friend, his partner… almost dead and lying on the bed in front of him, unable to react to his presence.

His thumb brushes ever so slightly across Kageyama’s forehead, pushing the hair off his skin. He sucks his trembling lips into his mouth and strokes a finger down Kageyama’s face, knowing himself useless, that his touch won’t be of any help. It’d actually make Kageyama angry, or at least a little flustered. For a short, selfish second, Hinata wonders if this is the only way he’ll be able to touch Kageyama at all, if the world is punishing him for having non-platonic thoughts about his friend, or if it is gifting him this stiff moment because it knows he wouldn’t be able to have Kageyama like this any other way.

His hand makes it to Kageyama’s chest and checks that he is breathing. He can see him heaving so very slowly, probably tired in ways Hinata cannot even imagine, hardly keeping him alive. He lets it rest there for a minute, then another, his mind a restless haze yet calm, too calm, currently waiting in the eye of the hurricane for what’s about to come to him.

For worse or for better, Kageyama doesn’t react to his touch—Hinata wonders if he will break him, or if the tremor of his body will startle Kageyama’s peaceful sleep.

As his eyes start to water and he feels he cannot breathe properly again, he takes his hand off Kageyama’s chest and stares away, frustrated to the deepest parts of his soul. He knows this isn’t his fault. It’s an irrefutable fact: he wasn’t there, he couldn’t have possibly done anything to hurt Kageyama like this, and yet he can’t help but wish he had done something, _anything_ , to prevent it. To prevent the bruises, the bleeding, the lumps and swelling of his skin, the probably irreparable damage to his body. He can’t even imagine what he might have looked like the first second after the accident, when he looks like this now.

Shuddering out a strangled breath, Hinata takes a sit next to Kageyama and holds his bandaged hand as carefully as he can. He stays there with him until someone comes to kick him out, hunched over towards the mattress, face hidden between his crossed arms—shaking, shaking, shaking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter's title:
> 
> "On the other side."
> 
> I'll post it on January 12 ♥️


	3. On the other side

For weeks on end, there has been nothing there to Kageyama. Absolute, impossible nothingness. The emptiest of voids.

When Kageyama opens his eyes, he can only see white.

Consciousness comes to him in unsteady thumps—a high-pitched sound here, a bit of light there, numbness, bile at the back of his throat, heaviness on his shoulders, pressure on his wrists and forearms. Fluttering eyelids, irresponsive legs. Warmth, cold, thirst, hunger. Confusion—calmness. His tongue licks the morning breath out (there’s too much light, everything’s bright and unpleasant).

The bed is too hard on his back. He can’t see much besides the blinding light coming in through the window. (He needs to get up.) His ceiling is white, but his curtains and walls aren’t. They aren’t supposed to be. He’s awfully exhausted, awfully disoriented. He tries to clear his throat but a pang of pain on his collarbones makes him wince, makes him stop.

“W-Wha-“ his voice dies within him, pressed down into silence by the soreness of his muscles.

He coughs, head finally tilting away from the light—unfortunately so. The moment he moves, a pang of colossal pain rockets through his body, shaking him to the bones.

He stays still—as still as he thinks he can be—and waits for the waves of agony to quiet down. It takes a lot of effort, a few long seconds and some careful, deep breaths, for the blinding pain to dissolve and allow his muscles to relax.

Something— _someone_ —startles by his side, pulling on his unresponsive hand. A blurry human-shaped shadow makes it into his range of vision, but his pupils are blown still, unable to correctly process these amounts of light. He hears a voice calling his name, somewhere in the distance, somewhere startlingly near, maybe in a far off setting of his imagination, careful and hopeful in ways Kageyama cannot understand.

Suddenly, the silence in his room becomes a terrible noisy nightmare. Suddenly, there’s people everywhere, their shapes fading into one another, turning the white into gray, into black. His eyelids fall closed and his jaw clenches, the ringing in his ears from the sudden auditory stimulus overwhelming his every sense.

“ _Kageyama…!_ ”

A cherished voice, moving away.

“ _Tobio_.”

A warm, loving hand on his forehead.

It takes Kageyama three minutes to start processing reality as it is. His vision unblurs enough to see his mother standing by his side, smiling sadly, tired, happy. He needs another thirty seconds to understand that the hand brushing the hair off his forehead is hers. There’s also three other unknown people surrounding what should be his bed, although he knows it isn’t. This isn’t his room, his bed nor his home. This looks like a hospital, and the strangers are dressed like doctors and nurses.

Shit, he’s in a hospital. It smells and sounds like one. It all makes sense, and somehow it doesn’t.

“Mom?” comes his raspy, abused voice. His mom moves a little closer, shushing him, cupping his face with hands too gentle, too foreign. She uses to be so severe, never this fragile. “Why—“

“It’s okay, Tobio, don’t force yourself,” she comforts him, without breaking eye contact. “You’re okay.”

“Bu-“

Another pained, impatient and familiar voice interrupts him, asking him things Kageyama can’t understand without asking them at all. “Kageyama?”

Natsuko takes her eyes off her son and looks at the other side of the room, Kageyama’s own following after. His heart is currently a fist of sand, taut and sooty and ready to topple down, and seeing Hinata a few strides away, clutching at his clothes anxiously and looking at him like he’s just resurrected, knocks a new found, uncontrollable dread over him.

He wants to ask what’s wrong, what’s going on, what the hell is happening to him. He wants to sit up and put his burning feet down on the floor to cool them on the tiles, but not a single muscle in his body reacts to any of his orders. This only accentuates the panic bubbling in him, his breathing starts to quicken, his vision blurs again—

“Shouyou, please wait outside, okay?” comes his mother’s voice, serious.

And, a few seconds too late, unsure and small, an answer:

“Okay...”

Kageyama can’t stop to think or to pay attention to the sound of Hinata leaving, because his mother hovers over him and instructs him how to breathe, how to calm down, and hell, he cannot calm down, he’s hyperventilating, he’s on the verge of passing out or having a seizure, he doesn’t fucking _know._

He closes his eyes so the world goes to black and the only thing existent for him is his mom’s reassuring words, her delicate fingers on the unexpectedly tender skin of his forehead.

“It’s okay,” she says, and Kageyama can’t muster up to do nothing else but believe her. “You’re okay.”

He takes a deep breath in; breathes out. And once more. In and out; a long inhale, a peaceful exhale.

“That’s it, you’re okay.”

He’s okay. He can be okay.

He has to.

* * *

The pain in his body is the result of a traffic accident he was part of, accident he cannot remember to the slightest degree. A car ran him over while he was making his way outside the Tokyo train station, knocking him into unconsciousness, and he’d been in an induced coma while his bones healed and reconstructed under his skin. Then, the doctors waited. They waited for him to wake up on his own terms, on the right time. And he kept on healing, on patching up his bloody, raw wounds, weaving slightly paler skin.

And here he is now. In absolute pain, barely able to move due to it, the sedative and medicine he is forced to digest barely helping him.

The doctor says something about mobility, about rehabilitation, medication, waiting, patience, recovery, healing bones and muscles—Kageyama cannot listen to it all. He cannot keep up with the rant, with all the technical words and concepts, not when he hasn’t even had time to process that someway, somehow, he’s ended up here, when he should absolutely not be.

By the end of the doctor’s speech, Kageyama has been shocked into pure silence.

“Do you have any questions?”

Kageyama has many, and can’t find them. He can’t take his eyes off his exposed, brutalized legs. He wants to ask someone to cover them for him, to put the horrifying image away from his sight, but not a single word makes it out of his mouth. There’s too many scars cutting across his skin, too many marks, too many lingering bruises.

Natsuko answers for him. “I think he needs to process it all.”

There's a window in front of him, and if he looks up he can see a clear reflection of him on his bed, his mom by his side, and the doctor’s back blocking half of his body from view. Even with the doctor here, he cannot look up and see himself. He can’t see his own face. His legs don’t feel like his own, he doesn’t know what’ll happen if he doesn’t see himself looking back into his eyes.

Natsuko stays with him after the doctor and nurses leave, expecting to reassure him, but she only makes Kageyama’s fear increase, his anger to bloom and claw between his ribs. She doesn’t answer his questions, doesn’t seem to want to. _Not yet, not now, you have to rest_ , she replies to everything he asks, her hands too affable, too compassionate. He doesn’t want this version of her. He wants the version that screams and snaps at him and always brutalizes him with the truth, and maybe, later, soothes him with some sort of comfort.

He would break something if his arms would fucking react. He would cover or hide his face as his eyes start to water, both from the shock and the frustration, the inevitability of it all, the massive impotence.

“Can I have a moment?” he pleads, all too fragile. He doesn’t feel like himself.

Natsuko presses her lips on a tight line. “Of course.”

It takes Kageyama a second after the door has clicked closed behind his mom to spill the tears burning his eyes. He’d clench his fingers around the sheets he’s lying upon if he could move his body, if any part of him besides his stiff neck could answer to his pleading. The doctor assured he’d recuperate mobility with time and rehabilitation, but that’s not enough. It’s not enough, not nearly—he’s fucking terrified, fucking scared shitless.

His body shakes out of his control, intensifying the pain shooting through his muscles and his skin. He can’t stop his sobbing nor control the way his chest convulses, making his bones dig into wounds, into bloody bruises, his joints pressing into bandages, nervous tissues being torn in slow, sharp tugs. He’s in such intense pain that he cannot start to comprehend how he’s going to heal from this.

It isn’t only his body—his brain is in a desperate run to get out of the fire ignited within him.

Although he tries to escape this reality, there’s nowhere for him to go—no release, no consolation price, no waking up from the feverish hell he’s submerged in. He stays on the bed for hours, unable to move and refusing to ask for help or comfort. He refuses to let people see him breaking down like this. He refuses to believe everything’s been torn to bits and pieces.

At some point he falls asleep, face tear-stained and redder than before.

After the time they’ve waited for Kageyama to give them a signal that he wants them near, once the clock starts ticking closer to the end of visiting hours, Natsuko asks Hinata to go home. Hinata goes without much conviction, pleading her to let him come back tomorrow, when Kageyama is feeling better. Natsuko doubts her son will feel better tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, but she accepts anyways, knowing that Hinata needs some sort of reassurance too, above all after spending almost every day by his son’s side, standing in for her while she ran errands and took care of other things.

When she goes back into the room an hour or so before midnight, she finds Kageyama already sleeping, stiff and in the same position he’s been lying on for the past two months, with his head lolled to the side.

She turns the lights of the room off and covers Kageyama with a thin sheet, hand momentarily stopping by his cheek, careful not to disturb his sleep, and somehow waiting—and yearning—for him to open his eyes again. She doesn’t want him to sleep again.

It’s been two long months without him.

The next few days pass in a hurried mess. Since everything was quiet and still while he slept, now that he’s awake and trying to swallow it all down, his reactions and slow processing of the events make her relive her own uncertainty, her denial, her fears and confusion.

Kageyama refuses to talk to anyone or let anyone visit him, so the doctors give him a pair of days of space before he’s meant to talk to the psychologist and let them explain her planned treatment.

Natsuko has to explain to a very agitated Hinata that Kageyama needs to be alone, now, that he needs time to himself. And Natsuko understands his impatience, really. She wants to be able to talk to her son without having him snarl or spit out some harsh word, some variant of _leave me alone,_ or without having to lie to him about the time that’s passed, the way his body broke with the hit although now it’s mostly healed. She wants the doctors to be there with her, mostly the psychologist, since she isn’t very nice or very careful with her phrasing, and she doesn’t want to disturb Kageyama anymore.

He needs time and comprehension. That’s the one and only thing they can give him.

Even if Hinata cannot go inside and see him, he spends the few hours between the end of practice and visiting hours in the hospital’s hallways, waiting. These are boring, empty hours, perfect for his brain to slaughter him with fears and worries. And there’s nothing to soothe him. There’s nothing he can do besides waiting for Kageyama to let him in.

The evening after Kageyama’s awakening, after being kindly told to leave for the night, he had dialed Kageyama’s number before realizing that he probably didn’t want to be reached, and that he couldn’t answer his phone. He had put his mobile phone under his pillow and had tried to fall asleep, his thoughts coming back to his finally conscious friend every chance they got, wondering and worrying and leaping with excitement and dread. He had been so patient and understanding while Kageyama slept, and yet the first thing he did when he knew he was awake was demanding to see him, to talk to him, as if he couldn’t wait any more to know that he was, in fact, still alive.

But he has no other option than to wait.

Hence, that’s what he does. Or so he tries.

He spends the next few days more agitated than he normally is; constantly fidgeting, getting on everyone’s nerves because he can’t bring himself to stop shifting, bouncing his leg or tapping his fingers against any surface or thing he can reach. It’s a difficult chore to soothe his nerves when all he is capable of is worrying for Kageyama and yearn for the moment Kageyama lets him in.

And when Kageyama finally allows him to go inside his hospital room to see him, five days after opening his eyes, Hinata takes a few seconds by his door to calm down, to mentally prepare himself to _not_ overwhelm his friend more than he probably is. Which is a difficult thing to do, above all because the moment he enters the room he sees how irritated, how _furious_ Kageyama must be feeling. Kageyama won’t even glance at his mom as she makes her way outside, giving them space.

Natsuko squeezes Hinata’s shoulder and offers a tight, concerned smile that does nothing to comfort him. The door clicks behind her, and suddenly they are alone.

Hinata has spent whole hours sitting by Kageyama’s unconscious side, and somehow that hasn’t prepared him to be alone with him now. There’s too many things going on inside his head. He’s happy to be able to talk to Kageyama again, expecting to tell him about everything he’s missed and everything they’ve accomplished without him. He wants to be teasing and snicker with him, but he’s not sure Kageyama is ready for that, or if he will be at all in the near future. His happiness can’t be compared to the colossal relief of knowing Kageyama is—or can be—okay, or to the pangs of worry devouring his insides because no matter what the doctors say or what everyone wants to believe, Kageyama is not okay. And there’s a possibility that he won’t be.

His hands grab at the straps of his schoolbag. His eyes avert and seek Kageyama, over and over and over, jumping from the windows and walls and floor to him, always back to him. He doesn’t know what to tell him. He doesn’t know what Kageyama needs to hear. The kind of fury Kageyama’s wearing is one Hinata has never seen or felt; he can’t understand it, and he doesn’t know how to.

Therefore, he waits. He waits until Kageyama is ready, until he feels like he can voice his thoughts or like he’ll be able to greet him without unravelling his hatred at him.

Hinata starts to notice little details in Kageyama’s behavior the more he stands there in silence. The first and more uplifting one is that he’s been able to move his legs a little, since they’re not straight as sticks lying before him. The more unsettling one is the way he is breathing, ragged and extremely controlled, like all his focus is on the way his lungs inflate and deflate, on the quantity of oxygen entering him, and the co2 escaping past his parted lips. Hinata’s hands itch with the need of touching his hair and forehead the way he’s done while he was asleep, as if that could somehow calm him.

“Kage-“

“How long has it been?” Kageyama interrupts before Hinata can finish. He doesn’t look up, too enraged to be able to face anyone, and pathetically immobilized on this stupid hospital bed. “Nobody wants to tell me.”

Hinata blinks. “What?”

There’s an edge to Kageyama’s voice that makes Hinata’s body grow cold—an edge like he has been severely cut, like he’s about to break. “How _long_ have I been here? They won’t– They don’t want to talk about it.”

Hinata fidgets where he’s standing. “Um. I don’t think–“

“Just fucking tell me!”

Hinata falls silent, startled.

This is nothing like what he expected when he dreamed of Kageyama waking up again. He thought everything would go back to normal, that he’d be okay, that _everything_ could be. And yet there’s nothing, not a single hint, telling him that their situation is going to improve. He wishes he had tools and machinery enough to be able to fix it. He wishes he were smart and ingenious, a little more straightforward or honest than he can be right now, because maybe, just maybe, he’d be able to help him.

“It’s–“ He swallows past the need to lie, pushing through all the detailed narrative he had written in his head about what Kageyama has missed. “You’ve been here a few months.”

Kageyama’s jaw clenches. “How many?”

“Two and a half, now.”

Kageyama sucks in a shaky breath. Surprisingly, the anger corroding him seems to fade, if only slightly.

He looks up in Hinata’s direction, although his eyes stay away from his. “How’d nationals go?”

Hinata steps forward, sprang into action by what little attention Kageyama is giving him. He doesn’t want to be invasive or to bombard him with information, though, doesn’t want Kageyama’s rage to afloat again. “Well. Really, really well, actually.”

He doesn’t have the guts to say that they made it to the final quarters. He doesn’t have the guts to go into detail about everything that has happened—school, nationals, training camps, everyone they met and everyone they faced. He’s starting to understand that this isn’t going to be a happy reunion, nor a happy comeback.

His words ease some pain off Kageyama’s expression. He rests his head back into the pillows and stares up at the ceiling, sighing.

There’s so many things that Hinata wants to ask him. If he’s in pain, both physically and emotionally, if he’s scared, if he needs someone to talk to, if he wants to know anything about the past months, if he knows what treatment the doctors are going to give him… yet the only thing he is brave enough to ask is, “Did the doctors say anything?”

Kageyama scoffs depreciatingly, turning his face away from him. “No.”

He hasn’t said anything specific, but Hinata feels like he’s being pushed out of the room again. “Sorry.”

Kageyama looks at him—his eyes meeting his for the first time in months—with a frown. “What for?”

“I don’t know,” Hinata mutters, shrugging a shoulder.

Kageyama stares at him for a little longer, but Hinata can’t stare back.

They fall into an awkward silence—unmoving, speechless—not knowing how to reach out for the other through this mess, through their own personal nightmares. The fact that Kageyama hasn’t asked Hinata to leave yet is enough to ease off some of the negativity consuming him. At least, he hopes, Kageyama wants him around. If not, he wouldn’t have let him see him like this. As far as Hinata knows, he’s the only other person in Kageyama’s life besides Natsuko that he’s allowed to visit him.

And perhaps Kageyama doesn’t know that the whole team came by the instant they learnt about his accident. Perhaps he doesn’t know about the exhausting and uncomfortable nights Hinata has slept away curled on the armchair next to his bed, his sleepy eyes trying to catch any signal that Kageyama was awakening, or the countless days he came running after practice to see him before he saw his own family. Or how his fingers sought his hands when nobody was watching him, how he lingered a caress here and there while muttering encouraging words, as if he could make him heal faster.

Perhaps, Kageyama doesn’t know that Hinata and his mother have chatted these two months away together, that although Natsuko has guarded him like the soldier she is, sometimes she’s asked Hinata to take her turn shielding him. He cannot know that Hinata has spent plenty of hours in the hallways of the hospital when he wasn’t allowed in his room, doing his homework or talking with other familiars and patients. He doesn’t know that Hinata’s life has revolved around him without him even meaning to.

There’s no way Kageyama knows, unless someone has told him. Hinata doubts that Natsuko, who’s the only one who knows precisely how many hours Hinata has spent in the hospital, would have mentioned it to him.

“How have you been?” comes Kageyama’s voice, tentative, unsure.

The simple question surprises Hinata. He tries to take some edge off his answer with a breathless laugh. “Worried.”

First, Kageyama’s eyes widen, almost imperceptibly. Then, they soften—painfully so, making Hinata blush.

Kageyama takes his eyes off him, flustered. “Dumbass.”

Hinata blushes even harder. He spits out a laugh, covering his face with his hands and shaking a little. The situation is so awkward and stupid that his nerves have pushed him in the complete opposite emotion of what he’s feeling. And the more he thinks that this is absurd—this aching, this turn of events—the more he laughs.

Kageyama raises an eyebrow, looking skeptically at him. “You really want to laugh right now?”

Hinata doubles over and keeps on laughing, even though he’s trying really hard to stop. “No… _No_ , sorry! Sorry. I just–” A snort cuts his words short.

Kageyama is in ruins, there’s no denying that. He’s in ruins, all dust and broken walls, without knowledge of how to put himself back together. Amidst the terror and the refusal, he’s glad he can have Hinata by his side. Hinata is not like his mother, who has unsettled him even more by trying to keep her composure and by avoiding the everyday, familiar conflicts and strictness with which she usually treats her son. Hinata seems to have stayed true, to not care about this mess, and isn’t pretending to be something he is not in order to protect him.

Right now, Kageyama doesn’t want to be protected. He wants to feel normal. Hinata is making him feel just that.

By the end of his unexpected cackling, Hinata has reached the side of Kageyama’s bed, his hands resting atop it, and Kageyama has put on a small, tired smile. Hinata rubs the wetness off his eyes, his leftover chuckling making his lips tremble at the corners, tempting another laugh.

Even though his mom had insisted to let him in sooner, Kageyama hadn’t wanted to. He didn’t need another face full of pity. He didn’t need more judging, analytic eyes on him, didn’t need someone else’s optimistic words in his head, dueling with his own personal pessimism. He didn’t want to see Hinata, or anyone in his school or his team, not until he had gone back to normal.

But he guesses this is okay. If Hinata can keep being his normal self with him, then everything will be okay.

“And you?” Hinata asks after a while, softly. His eyes find Kageyama’s and hold them, tender. “How are you?”

Kageyama has to look away. “Could be better.”

Hinata snorts. “Right.”

It’s hard to see while facing the other way, but Hinata’s little, relieved smile still gives him goosebumps.

For a second, they’re both able to breathe. Kageyama gets distracted from reality enough to forget about it. Hinata glimpses a spark of hope in their near future, somewhere where he’ll be able to grasp it.

It’s so easy to forget about the rawness of the present, that when Kageyama considers—or rather, tries to come to terms with—the fact that he wants to move closer to Hinata and his body doesn’t react, his blood mutates into ice inside his veins. His chest constricts; his breathing falters. He wants to look back at Hinata but the heaviness on his eyes makes it hard to do so.

He feels Hinata’s hand tapping his arm softly before he speaks. “I should go home, but I can come back tomorrow afternoon.”

Kageyama clears his throat, uncomfortable. Hinata is so close he could probably see, and probably be alarmed by, the wetness on his eyes.

“If you want me to, that is,” Hinata mumbles, suddenly timid.

Kageyama wishes he could shrug a shoulder—shrug him off without using his voice, without wavering words too honest and too broken. He clears his throat for good measure. “Sure.”

“Great!” The eagerness on Hinata’s voice makes Kageyama quiver. “I’ll bring a movie or something, okay? I’ll be here as soon as practice ends.”

Kageyama’s face turns slightly toward him, intending to look at him, but unable to do so. Hinata’s fingers curl around his arm to squeeze before he takes a step away, waving a hand at him.

“See you tomorrow, yamayama!”

The nickname makes Kageyama’s head spin to throw an angry glare at him. A grimace blooms on his face from the pain of the sudden movement. “Don- Don’t call me like that!”

Hinata is already by the door, swinging it open and then closed behind him. He makes sure to stick his tongue out at him before disappearing, faking a scowl that cannot compete against the huge smile tempting his lips, which he allows to be out once the door is fully closed.

Hinata breathes out, stuttering, with his hand firmly closed around the doorknob. His smile wobbles; his shoulders, jaw and limbs shake. If he weren’t in public, he would probably burst out crying—if from relief or happiness, he can hardly tell.

Kageyama is only a wall away, completely conscious and alive. He’s been sitting by his side for the past two months and yet this is the closer he’s had him, the closer they’ve been. He knows Kageyama is trying to hide from the eyes of the world. However, he’s made it inside his fortress and into the King’s room, where no one else is allowed.

He presses his forehead to the door—one, two, three seconds, obliging his body to stop shaking, imagining Kageyama’s heat at the other side of the wall—before he turns on his heels to leave, content in ways he has never been.

On the next day, and all through the night while Natsu and him go through his list of favorite films, Hinata is gleaming. There’s this flicker captured inside him, this starry glow, that peeks out of his eyes, of his smile, tinting his cheeks pink and bouncing him off his feet.

Yachi asks him about last afternoon, about how Kageyama is doing, if he’s healthy, if there’s a chance to go visit him any time soon. He’s reminded that this giddiness isn’t fair, that everyone is worried about Kageyama and that Kageyama is suffering. He shouldn’t be this happy, this ecstatic. He shouldn’t be relieved. Not yet.

Everyone asks if they can tag along after practice to visit Kageyama. Everyone feels the same need to know he’s well and alive; it isn’t only him. And nevertheless, selfishly and carefully, he says he isn’t sure Kageyama is ready to see anyone yet. Reluctantly, with some skeptic glances thrown his way, and some saddened ones, too, they accept his words, although he has to promise them he’ll ask their friend when can they go see him.

By the end of practice, Yachi stops him before he can escape and gives him a handmade postcard decorated with pressed flowers for him to deliver to Kageyama.

“So he knows we’re thinking of him,” she says, face looking a little pink.

When Hinata opens it, he sees a bunch of short, handwritten messages from the karasuno team, and what seems to be Tsukishima’s cartoonized version of Kageyama drawn on the upper left corner of the folded paper. He smiles down at it, puts it inside his bag and takes off in the hospital’s direction.

The hallways are more crowded than usual. He waves sheepishly at the pair of nurses he knows, at the grandchildren he’s sometimes been attacked by while they played in the corridors the days they visited their sick grandmother. He knows a lot of the people half-living half-surviving here, is aware of their situation as much as they are of his. He doesn’t want to think of the ways this place is turning into a second home, into a newfound routine. He wants it to vanish off his life.

He doesn’t see Natsuko outside, so he deduces she’s either out doing errands or inside with Kageyama. He knocks at the door, but nobody answers it. Unaware of the argument going on inside Kageyama’s room, he opens the door and peeks inside. “Hello?”

“And you have to understand that I don’t need you to-!”

Kageyama’s anger makes Hinata freeze. The sound of the door clicking open has Kageyama’s voice quieting down into a puff of ragged breath, his words cut short.

Both mother and son look at him, perplexed, a little pale and a little red, caught in the middle of what Hinata guesses is a fight. His body springs up, straightening unnaturally. He gestures toward the hallway, making silly, incomprehensible noises. “Um, I can, like- Sorry, I just-“

“Shou-kun...” says Natsuko, stepping away from his son’s bed. Kageyama’s eyebrows shoot up at the sound of the nickname. “It’s okay, come in. I was already leaving.”

“Are-“ His eyes find Kageyama’s. He can’t read what he’s thinking. “Are you sure?”

Kageyama looks away, giving a tiny nod. Then comes Natsuko’s voice. “Of course, son. Don’t worry.”

“Um, okay.”

Hinata walks into the room, uncomfortable to the highest levels, knowing both of them are hyper aware of his every step.

He smiles at Kageyama when he’s by his side, shy. “Hi.”

Kageyama’s face seems to relax. One of the corners of his lips turns upwards. “Hey.”

Natsuko slips into her jacket and hangs her purse on the crook of her arm. She gives Hinata a smile, and a serious glance to his son. “I’ll be back by nine. Be good, you two.”

“Whatever,” Kageyama mutters, without looking at her.

She presses her lips on a tight line and takes a deep breath. She’s not going to start a fight again. They can finish their conversation any other time.

Once she has left the room, Hinata turns to Kageyama with the intention of asking what was that about, but Kageyama doesn’t give him the chance.

“Forget that you saw that,” he orders, all too serious, too harsh, soft smile and kind eyes long gone.

Hinata wants to complain, but seeing Kageyama’s upset expression he decides to let it go, if only this time, and because he doesn’t want Kageyama to ask him to leave him.

“I brought you something,” he announces instead, putting his schoolbag on the bed to open it. “I mean, it’s not mine, but they’ve asked me to bring it to you.”

Kageyama eyes Hinata’s face carefully. There’s a few freckles on his cheeks, right underneath his eyes, almost erased by his tanner skin. He has never really taken a good look at Hinata’s face—not up close, never for more than a second—but he’s so close now that he can appreciate every crinkle, every stain and shade of his. He wouldn’t be able to move away from him even if he could.

It hasn’t been a good day. Actually, he doesn’t think he’s had a good day ever since he woke up, and that’s if he doesn’t take into account the months he’s spent unconscious. Everything has been so, so very awful that not even Hinata’s presence could take him away from it. Or so he thinks so, because suddenly he spots Hinata’s phone charm hanging off one of the straps of his schoolbag, too out of place to not be noticeable, and his vital organs start doing pirouettes inside of him.

It is, in all honesty, the ugliest thing Kageyama has ever seen.

They had once stopped by an amusement arcade after a long afternoon of studying in Yachi’s apartment, because Hinata had insisted they deserved to have some fun. Kageyama didn’t find any enjoyment in these types of places, above all when all they did was take money from him, but he hadn’t been able to refuse Hinata’s joyful smile and eager tug on his wrist. He had followed him out of instinct, out of the embarrassing need to spend more time with him.

They had tried some of the games, to which Hinata had mostly lost. Since Hinata had chosen all of them, he had asked Kageyama what he wanted to try next, and he had pointed to the nearest merchandiser to him, which happened to be a jellyfish phone charm vending machine. Hinata had lifted an eyebrow, not quite sure that was the best of options. It wasn’t Kageyama’s fault that he chose that shitty game, really, it was all Hinata’s. If he hadn’t looped his arm around his or pressed his chin to his shoulder, looking up at him with a playful smile, Kageyama’s brain wouldn’t have shortcut, and he would have been able to form coherent, understandable thoughts.

He had won the ugliest of all those jellyfishes (which also happened to glow in the dark). It was pink and fat, a bubble of slightly slimy plastic, and the only one that didn’t have tentacles. It was just a huge ass head, as if they had chopped the top of a mushroom off and had painted it pink.

His face must have been one hell of an image as he held the pitiful charm between his fingers, because Hinata had turned away from him to cackle. Kageyama had felt the urge to slap him across the head. Instead, he had tapped Hinata’s shoulders and offered the ugly thing to him.

“It’s for you,” he had announced. “As a gift.”

Hinata’s face had dropped, his laugh ceasing. He had looked between the hideous thing and his face, not knowing if Kageyama’s words were a joke or not. But then, as he had kept on staring, his cheeks had turned slightly pink, and Kageyama had finally realized what he had done.

“Well, if you don’t want it-“

“No!” Hinata had snapped the charm out of his hands, protecting it between his own and against his chest. “It’s mine now. Stupidly ugly and mine.”

And now, that terribly unaesthetic thing is hanging off Hinata’s schoolbag for everyone to see. Because Kageyama had gifted it to him. And because he wants to have something that belongs to Kageyama with him.

Hinata has to snap his fingers in front of him to bring him back to the present, since his brain is doing crazy spirals in his cranium. He looks down at what Hinata is showing him, blinking the astonishment away.

“Yacchan and Yamaguchi made it, and everyone has written something.” Hinata opens the postcard for him to read it, if only superficially. “Even stupidshima drew this,” he points out, touching the tiny doodle at the top of the paper.

Kageyama’s body has been tense for hours. Due to the pain, the stress, the fight with his mother, Hinata’s presence… and upon seeing his teammate’s uplifting comments, it can finally relax back into his pillows. It is only momentary—it will probably go away the moment he doesn’t have the postcard in front of himself—but knowing that everyone cares about him and wants to see him get better makes it easier to accept that he’s going to have to work for his recovery.

“Thanks,” he mumbles, at last. He would take the postcard if he could, just to hold everyone’s wishes between his hands. “I mean it.”

Hinata’s eyes squint, happy and grateful.

He’d like to smile back. Before he has the chance to do so, Hinata has turned away from him, placing the postcard on the table next to his bed, and taking out his laptop.

“Ready for a movie?”

Kageyama is definitely ready to take his mind off his own thoughts, and his thoughts off his useless body. What he’s not ready for is to have Hinata right next to him, sitting back against the pillows so his laptop is on top of both of their legs for them to see the screen with ease.

Their shoulders are brushing. Kageyama’s hand is slightly hidden under Hinata’s thigh. Hinata’s elbow is basically on top of his stomach. This is something Kageyama is definitely, unquestionably not ready for. And he cannot even move away.

The movie starts, and it’s so stupid and random that he immediately forgets about his surroundings, complaining to his friend that he could have chosen literally any other film in the entire wide universe, but he had to choose this huge amount of bullshit.

Hinata laughs, shouldering him. The touch makes them both fall silent, awkwardly so, becoming aware of just how close they are.

Kageyama’s mind races—(tiny hands, bright wide laugh, hazel eyes, freckles on cheeks)—as if his body could react to its urges and emergency.

If it weren’t because it’s happening right this moment, Hinata would have it hard to believe that he could be with Kageyama like this. He knows it’s cruel, taking into account the reason why they’ve ended here. He knows his priority should be to comfort Kageyama in the tedious path that lays ahead of him, but he thinks he has earned this, too. They both have earned their time together, and in the end, they left their relationship at a very awkward moment. They have a lot of things to figure out and fix together.

Hinata was scared Kageyama wouldn’t want to see him _exactly_ because of how they parted. He didn’t want to lose his friendship, even less at a time like this, but it seems that both of them are walking in the same direction.

He looks down at his keyboard, tapping the keys softly, without pressing any. “I’m glad you woke up, you know.”

The film keeps playing, though everything else is silent. Kageyama fails to breathe for some seconds, forgetting what it is like to make his body function. His eyes instinctively find the ugly jellyfish hanging off Hinata’s schoolbag—his pulse is gaining speed.

“You really scared me this time.”

Kageyama stares straight ahead, too flustered to look into Hinata’s direction.

“Dumbass,” he whispers, embarrassed. He lets his head rest against Hinata’s shoulder, eyelids falling closed. His joints grate as he does, muscles agonizing because it’s too much, too much, _too much_ , yet he doesn’t give a shit. He wants Hinata close more than he wants the pain to fade.

Hinata blushes a little at the contact, heart racing out of his control. He doesn’t know if Kageyama wants him to, or if he will get mad, but he indulges himself a little and presses his cheek to the top of his head, his hand closing around Kageyama’s so his fingertips brush Kageyama’s burning palm. Kageyama lets him, frozen still by the pain of attempting to move, and probably because he’s sleepy and soft. But maybe, hopefully, because he’s missed Hinata’s proximity, and because he wants to have him back.

They stay like that until the movie is over and Hinata has to leave, and all through Kageyama keeps thinking of tiny hands wrapped around his, smiles pressed to the top of his head, a million freckles hidden under a tan, and eyes too bright and ceaselessly searching his.

Hinata asks if he can visit tomorrow, too, with a different movie or a game, maybe, anything to entertain him and take his thoughts away for a little while. Kageyama accepts with a tired smile that Hinata mirrors almost instantly. They may have stumbled upon a nightmare, but within it they’ve found this oasis, this heaven granted for them only.

And Hinata thinks; _everything can be okay_.


	4. Last one standing (interlude)

One day, before they even knew who they were going to be in each other’s lives, Hinata had said, “I'll have to defeat you, and I'll be the last one standing! The last ones standing are the victors.” He had been so sure, back then, that he’d get there some day, that he’d surpass the King in strength, agility, endurance…, that he’d be the best of both, no matter how hard he’d have to try.

They’ve been fighting to see who’s strongest, faster, smarter, and every little thing they can be, ever since Kageyama and he found out they’d have to put up with the other’s presence every day of the year.

It’s as much fun as it is a challenge, to keep up with Kageyama’s stubbornness and determination. Most of the time, Hinata is glad that they have each other to spur in their growth. Every other moment, he’s in awe of Kageyama’s strength, knowing himself feebler, weaker.

However, they’ve started to become more and more equal, as time passes. Hinata learns as fast as he runs, and soon enough Kageyama feels the pressure of the little crow gnawing at the back of his neck, reminding him they’re aiming for the same goal.

There’s some things Hinata will always be better at than Kageyama. There’s some dreams they share that Hinata will be able to seize before him, even if Kageyama wishes he could step ahead from him.

Today, Hinata dreams the sweetest of dreams. This dream isn't only a dream, it's also a memory.

In it, he's sitting in front of Kageyama's desk, dozing off to sleep in the school break while they make their homework. Kageyama is scribbling something on his notebook, the soft light of the cloudy day dawning on his back, delineating his figure.

Everyone is chatting lightly, eating their food or reading a book. No one is paying attention to them, or to Kageyama's concentrated face—he's only visible to Hinata's sleepy eyes. Hinata feels happy and safe, in this private bubble they're in, without anyone's attention on him, not even Kageyama's.

He looks at him for some long minutes, until he's unexpectedly asleep, purring contentedly into his crossed arms.

He makes sure not to flinch or open his eyes when he feels Kageyama putting his jacket over his shoulders and back, his fingers momentarily pulling his locks of hair off his forehead to see his face. The touch is so gentle it warms the deepest parts of his soul, reaching past his shivering heart to where no one has reached before.

Only when he hears Kageyama scribbling on his notebook again, does he nuzzle into his arms and sigh, blushing and smiling the smallest of smiles.

When he wakes up, he's not in school any longer, and Kageyama isn't studying in front of him anymore. Instead, Kageyama is curled by his side, snoring, with his face pressed to his shoulder and his left arm dropped across his tummy. The movie they were watching has finished long ago and the screen is black; everything has fallen silent.

He puts the laptop on the nightstand and concedes his head to fall atop Kageyama's, breath stuttering at the sensation of having him so close.

There’s been moments like this, few and apart, when they've allowed themselves to be as close as they are now. Sometimes it’d be a hand brushing atop another, squeezing the other’s shoulder or arm, their ankles touching and never-moving under their classroom desk while they did their homework... Sharing a bite of food, a cloth, a second together, a glance, silence.

There’s been moments when Hinata has thought their feelings are the same, that he’d have a chance if he ever were to confess. He doesn’t think Kageyama misunderstood what he did by the station, or that he’s forgotten about it, at all. He doesn’t think Kageyama feels disgusted or that he doesn’t want to return his feelings. He’s sure if none of this had happened, after Kageyama had come back from training camp, they’d have sorted it out. But the accident happened, and Kageyama broke in more ways than just physical.

Hinata hasn’t really thought about how he feels, how much he wants to express his emotions and desire. He hasn’t, because he knows it’s not the place nor the time. However, in moments like this, when life seems to isolate them from its cruelty, when he can’t help but remember all the other times they have reached out for the other, his mind can’t stop pondering about it, stirring him up inside and out. And then, under all the excitement and yearning, there’s this fear, cold and breaching and furious, that wants to demolish everything else.

Even though they always fight and bicker, it’s all good-hearted and amiable, never an actual conflict or dispute. There is one thing, though, that Hinata knows he’s won at. Unfortunately for both of them, he doesn’t think Kageyama would be able to disagree on it.

One day, Hinata said that he’d defeat Kageyama and become the strongest of them. He hadn’t thought about the way life would turn out for them, how he’d love Kageyama in ways he hasn’t loved before, and how they’d nourish each other’s ambition, each other’s goals. He hadn’t thought that life would take Kageyama out of the battle without him even wanting to, without asking for permission or giving him the chance to say goodbye.

One day, Hinata finds that Kageyama is not by his side anymore—not in the court, not in school, not in any bit of his life. He finds out that he’s come through victorious, that he’s better at holding on to him, to them; that he still believes they can somehow make it.

Kageyama has let go.

And he’s the last one standing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next update will have to wait a lil longer, since my final project is closing in and I need to focus on it.


	5. Until it breaks

He stares at the white wall for minutes on end, boring holes on its surface.

The room has started to make him sick just by being in it, by thinking about it. These white walls are driving him insane.

It’s like time hasn’t passed while not stopping at all. Everything has relented to a pitiful whimper, a yearn for motion and an inability to grasp it. Routine has captured him, dreadful and heavy and repetitive, with no intentions of setting him free. Meanwhile, in the outer world, everything keeps spinning and growing. Here, he can only rot.

It becomes clear to the people around him that his moral is entombed. They try to keep his spirit alive and make him see that there’s an exit to this. He’s forced to videochat with his teammates from karasuno, if only for a few minutes before he excuses himself. Yachi visits him one Saturday morning and tries not to look too shocked when she sees with her own eyes that Kageyama can’t, in fact, freely move some parts of his body, and Kageyama pretends not to notice how careful she is, as if half of one of her words could break him whole.

Everything they do seems to add more pressure on his shoulders—nothing satisfies him, nothing soothes him. Reality is what it is: he’s spent two months unconscious, another one and a half wasted trying to recuperate. He’s becoming impatient, hopeless. He’s not moving freely, still, and that’s all he wants. The empty promises and half-assed words can stay as far away from him as imaginable.

The thing is: even as he regains mobility of his lower body and he’s able to sneak out of his room on his own, he’s barely left alone. When his mother can’t be with him in the afternoons, Hinata fills in their silence, and inbetween their visits, there’s always someone coming in and out of the room—a new patient, a nurse, a doctor, someone to check on him. He’s asphyxiating, and although their hands aren’t touching him and he knows they have good intentions, it’s a hundred per cent their fault.

At least, Natsuko has stopped spending every hour of the day in the hospital with him. He’s glad she’s there to support and protect him, really—he wouldn’t have gotten anywhere in life if it weren’t for his mom—but he needs her to live her own life. He needs their dynamic back, the way they sought each other out if needed and how they respected their privacy.

And Hinata, although he may think he’s helping, has pushed him all the way to the edge of the cliff which’s existence he’s been denying since he woke up.

Hinata never asks him about medical stuff or questions the pace at which he’s rehabilitating, but that doesn’t take the pressure off Kageyama’s shoulder. He wants to be okay again. He wants to stand back on the court with him, with their team, and toss and play with everyone the way he loves to.

(He feels short of breath.)

The more he wants to play, and the more he thinks he is wasting his precious time in the hospital, the more he rushes into his healing, and the more frustrated he grows. He’s called to his doctor’s office more often than he’d hope for, where he’s scolded for doing some of the exercises in the loneliness of his room or rushing the healing process in dangerous ways. He’s told over and over again his development will be slow, and that if he accidentally injures himself, it’ll be even harder to heal. And although everyone pleads him to be patient, he can’t. He can’t be patient, and he keeps trying on his own, and he keeps growing more and more impatient, more and more helpless.

There’s no bruises left on his body, but the purple under his eyes has manifested in their place, and all the scars have remained. He cannot erase them off him, just like he can’t curl the pinky on his left hand all the way, or how he can’t do more than thirty squats without a pang of pain spreading out from his knees, which are still unaccustomed to this type of effort. When he’s wanted to jump, his foot has twisted uncontrollably under him on the landing. Or when he’s tried to position himself for a set up, the way he’d always do during a match, his left arm has tried with all its might to function as it has always done, but his right one hasn’t.

Sometimes, he’s found himself scratching at his scars with jerky fingers, drawing out a raw redness on his already damaged skin. Sometimes, his joints have squeaked in complain after hours of unconsciously having his muscles tense, and while his doctor assures there’s no need to rush, that he needs time, Kageyama can’t do anything but require his body to respond faster. Most mornings, he’s found himself wishing that he would not wake up, until all that’s left of him is this useless body, and he’s set free from it.

Sometimes, his mom would say an encouraging word and he would snap and snarl in ways no son should ever do, above all unprovoked. Or his best friend would be sitting next to him, doing nothing, saying nothing, and he’d beg to a god he knows doesn’t exist to make him disappear.

(They’re only trying to help him—every day, every hour, constantly standing or sitting by his side, interrupting every single silence.)

(There’s so much noise that he can’t breathe.)

In school, Hinata hasn’t exactly been subtle about Kageyama’s situation, although he has tried. However, when Yachi confirms Kageyama’s state to the team, the word starts to spread until it reaches unexpected ears. And then Kageyama reaches a point of no return.

It happens on a Friday afternoon, after he’s just eaten lunch and his mom has left to do some work.

His teammates are on their way to Tokyo for some training, so there’s no prospect of Hinata visiting him during the weekend. He may call at some point, but Kageyama doubts he will pick up the phone.

He has contaminated what he feels for Hinata, for his team, for the people he once admired, for the doctors, the nurses, the people at school, the ones he imagines running in the woods, those playing indoors and those shouting and jumping and doing everything he can’t. In his imagination, they’re all out there living their lives, and he’s not.

(He’s not, he’s not, _he’s not_.)

This one specific Friday, when the sun’s light is strong and orange and blinding, someone who Kageyama admires and fears, someone he’s been following and who has followed him in return, appears at his hospital room’s door, uncalled.

He finds the door already open and a lifeless, bored, unmoving Tobio sitting on the hospital bed, staring straight ahead to the wall even though the light is probably impeding him of seeing it.

“Tobio,” he calls him, and his voice snaps something inside Kageyama that he’s had trouble keeping intact.

He spins toward the door, heart pounding for all the wrong reasons. His left hand turns into a loose fist. His right one stays stills. “Why are you here?”

“I heard about the accident.” Oikawa steps into the room, but keeps himself at good distance from his bed. “Could have been a silly rumor, so I went to karasuno to check for myself.”

Kageyama looks away from him. Oikawa isn’t wearing his school’s uniform, or the volleyball one.

“I obviously didn’t find you there.” Oikawa’s eyes roam the empty room, stumbling upon dirty clothes, an unfinished meal, and too many personal belongings for what should have been a short stay. He tries to find Tobio’s eyes, but they’re refusing him. “One of your tiny friends redirected me to this hospital.”

Immediately, without a beat, Kageyama thinks of Hinata. The venom in his veins poisons every positive thought he has of him, and his cells boil, his lungs can’t function—

“But for once, it wasn’t your partner who assaulted me. I kind of wish it had been him, though. The other dude was pretty furious when he saw me.”

The venom is now in his throat, bitter and raw. He wants to vomit it. His fury mutates into something unknown, stupefying the only parts of his body he can willingly move.

There’s some seconds of silence that Oikawa uses to choose the right words to say. He’s never been specially fond of Kageyama, but he has never looked down on him, either. He respects his ability, their rivalry, and seeing someone that he knows admires him in this state, makes his usual playful self hide. Tobio used to always look up to him, as a setter or as a senior. It’s the first time in their lives, even as much as Oikawa had tried to make Kageyama dislike him and leave him alone, that Kageyama doesn’t want to face him.

“So. How’s rehab going?” Those are the wrong words, he can tell by the stiffness that springs Kageyama’s body into an awkward sitting position. “That bad, huh?”

Kageyama covers his right hand with his left one, protectively. Out of all the people Kageyama doesn’t want to see, Oikawa has to be the one leading the list. Ever since he started high school, he’s wanted to prove his growth and worth by surpassing the person he’s learnt the most from, and the one whose strength he respects the most. He’s hating, hating, _hating_ that Oikawa is seeing him this feeble. He _hates_ that he can’t get up from the bed or else Oikawa will see the way his ankle sometimes still turns under him and he trips when trying to ease his weight off his twisted foot, or how his right arm hangs uselessly by his side, following the overall motion of his body without ability to act for itself.

The inevitability of it all, the overbearing truth that he may not get better even if he keeps going to rehabilitation, is more than half of what constitutes the venom intoxicating him. If he can’t play again, he won’t have anything. Nothing at all. Playing is his entire fucking universe. He couldn’t bear to lose it. And so he doesn’t think of it, even as the shadow of this immense truth hovers behind him, waiting to attack.

Oikawa’s presence feels just like the shadow’s.

During these weeks, late at night, past the first AM hours, he’s watched his rival’s recorded games and has imagined them growing stronger than he’ll ever be, without anyone to stop his anger or soothe his desperation. He’s imagined the relief on their faces when they learn he can’t compete any more, the rolling of eyes as if he wasn’t trying hard enough, and the mocking, depreciating smiles, the satisfied smugness on their expression because he won’t be their nuisance anymore. Those are the ones who hurt the most.

(It’s like there’s no oxygen left in the room.)

“Won’t even say a word?”

For once, Oikawa doesn’t mean any harm with his slight teasing, even if he inflicts it nonetheless. Kageyama’s body recoils, fiercely brought back to the present by the sound of his voice.

“What, then, does this mean you’re giving up?”

Kageyama’s head snaps towards him, for the first and only time that afternoon, eyes a living inferno and mouth set tight.

“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Kageyama grits out, before turning back away from his senior. “This doesn’t mean anything. I’ll defeat you.”

Somehow, Kageyama’s stubbornness allows Oikawa to breathe a little easier. He smirks, challenging. “That’s what I thought. There’s no real pride in winning if it is like this.”

Kageyama doesn’t say anything else, staring straight ahead—with the type of agitation and ardor he uses to feel before a game catching fires in his head. The challenge of Oikawa’s words and presence have always, and not only today, been able to spur the most competitive and defiant parts of him to the front, where they can shine and fight back. And that’s where they stay, for as long as Oikawa is inside the room behind him, chatting carefully before he’s had enough Tobio for a day, before he confirms that he doesn’t need to smack him upside the head to bring him back to reality, and then he leaves.

Even as much determination as Oikawa may have seen, there’s none of it left in Kageyama after he leaves.

Kageyama slumps back on his bed, where the night finds him, unmoving, shivering to the most unknown places within himself.

* * *

Hinata makes it to the hospital past visiting hours, which means he spends another half an hour trying to sneak into the corridors to see Kageyama. At last he makes it in, and only because the nurse he bumps into on his way inside already knows him and turns a blind eye on him breaking all the possible rules to exist.

He dashes through the halls as silently as possible, not wanting to get into trouble. He’s still excited due to training camp, dying to tell Kageyama about everything that’s happened and everyone they’ve met, heart racing fitful, perhaps not only thanks to train camp, perhaps because he wants to see Kageyama more than he wants to eat or go back home to his own bed.

His excitement is quickly shushed down into silence, into dread, when Tobio’s mother spots him, calling his name out, “Shou-kun!”

Hinata halts and turns to her, flushed cheeks turning even redder upon seeing her, knowing damn well the kind of picture he was giving by rushing into her son’s room past visiting hours without having warned them beforehand.

He vows down to her politely. “Hello, Ms Kageyama.”

“It’s very late, dear, why aren’t you home?”

He fidgets a little, the anticipation of seeing Kageyama and the embarrassment from being caught sneaking in making him rock his feet from side to side, hands gripping at the stripe of his bag. “I just got here from training camp and wanted to say hi.”

Natsuko’s tired smile trembles as it tries to stay put on her face. She pats the chair next to her, beckoning Hinata in. “Come here for a second, please.”

Hinata’s hands twitch nervously, mouth pinching to one side as he takes one look back at Kageyama’s door before tapping his way to the line of chairs.

Even though all he wants to do is see Kageyama already, he senses—by her posture, her energy—that something must have happened while he was away, and he’s not sure he’s ready to find out. He puts his bag on his lap and hugs it close to him, hands gripping at each other softly.

Natsuko isn’t staring at him. She can’t. Her mouth opens a few times as she orders the words and thoughts and restlessness, as she tries to push the truth out.

After a minute of silence and fidgeting, Hinata starts to get seriously worried. She seems out of energy. Her hair isn’t the straight line Hinata remembers; her eyes are swollen and baggy, red, expression fatigued. His heart gives one pitiful, restless beat when he comes to the conclusion that Kageyama is not okay. He doesn’t know what’s happened, but it’s certainly not going to make him happy.

Eventually, she finds the right words, or ones that feel accurate and bearable, and says, “It’s been a hard week for Tobio.”

Hinata’s muscles go taut, but he stays put, not interrupting.

The fluorescents on the ceiling are buzzing softly. No one’s talking, no one’s moving, no breeze makes it into the hospital through a door or a window. There’s only silence, and although Natsuko’s words die immediately within the pale walls, they echo in Hinata’s head for what seems to be an hour, but happens to be a total of four seconds.

“He hasn’t left the room in a pair of days now,” she continues. “I’m sure he’s going to be angry that I told you, but I think you needed to know before seeing him again.”

Hinata’s jaw is clenched so tightly he can’t open his mouth to say anything to her. Natsuko turns to him and tries to smile a little, pleading with her eyes, with her heart.

“Please be a little careful when you go in. He’s been very tired.”

Hinata can only muster up to nod. The hand Natsuko puts over his does nothing to soothe him.

She stays there in the hallway, sitting silently, as he walks up to Kageyama’s bedroom door. When he looks back, Natsuko’s eyelids are dropped, tired, and her eyes aren’t watching him anymore. Instead, she stares at the floor, sitting straight yet drained, exhausted. Like there’s no life left inside her.

Hinata gulps nervously before walking inside. He does so out of routine, and not because he wants to. He came with the idea to wake Kageyama up and chat together past the am hours and into the morning lights, when he’d leave him to rest. All the energy he’s dragging from the training camp keeps him jumpy, buzzing uncontrollably as he tries to keep still under Kageyama’s dreadful eyes.

“Leave,” Kageyama mutters, voice croaked, low.

Hinata doesn’t make a move to. Kageyama’s sorrow is drizzling on his own spirit, gluing him to where he stands, where he can see Kageyama and approach him if needed.

Since Kageyama doesn’t say another word, and seeing the way he’s trying to keep his breathing under control, Hinata takes a few steps closer and reaches out for Kageyama’s arm. Before he can touch him, though, Kageyama speaks up again:

“I want to be alone.”

Hinata ponders whether he should touch him or not. He knows he can comfort him, if Kageyama lets him. He knows _he_ needs to come into contact with him to feel a little better, as if assuring himself that Kageyama is actually okay.

He puts his hand on Kageyama’s shoulder, tentatively, without adding much pressure in case it bothered him.

“Kageyama–“

“Seriously,” Kageyama interrupts.

After a few seconds, Hinata takes his hand off him. He moves a little to see Kageyama’s expression, immediately regretting doing so. He has never considered the possibility that Kageyama could cry. When they first met, he saw Kageyama as a monster, an unbreakable opponent, even if later on he learnt he was the strongest ally he could hope for, the pillar of the team and of his own fragile self. He lifted him up every time he thought low of himself, although Hinata hadn’t done anything to deserve it.

Hinata has never considered or imagined a situation that could break Kageyama down to this. He has never thought he’d live to see the day Kageyama were about to cry in front of him—not like this, not in this type of situation. They cried together due to the frustration of losing their first tournament. They shared those emotions with each other, with the team, in a way that Hinata could understand, but he can definitely not understand what Kageyama is feeling now.

Even if Hinata cannot understand what’s happening to his friend, he can sure as hell be there for him, in any way he needs him. If Kageyama needs solitude, then he’ll grant it to him, but he doubts that’s what he truly yearns for now.

“I could, like, just sit here with you,” he suggests, softly. If he’s not careful enough, Kageyama could confine within the most obscure corners of his mind, where he wouldn’t be able to reach him. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

Kageyama’s jaw trembles. He gives the tiniest of nods, something so imperceptible that Hinata thinks he has imagined it. However, Kageyama doesn’t complain nor refuse when he approaches; Hinata takes his own queue and takes a sit next to him.

He faces Kageyama without looking up into his face, giving him, at least, that bit of personal space. His eyes stumble upon scar after scar on his arms, on what little he can see of his collarbones and neck. The sight makes his stomach twist sickly.

Hinata dares to fit his fingers around Kageyama’s left hand, that’s loosely closed in a fist.

“I’m tired,” Kageyama mumbles—maybe to himself, maybe only for Hinata to hear—defeated in ways Hinata cannot comprehend.

His skin is cold. Hinata shivers as he forces his fingers between Kageyama’s in what hopes is a comforting gesture. His heart leaps out of place when Kageyama clutches as strongly as his hand can, crying and grieving and asking him to stay without doing neither of those things at all.

Hinata knows he can’t say anything to ease the dread off Kageyama’s chest. He bends down and presses his forehead to Kageyama’s shoulder, wishing he could bring himself to embrace him, to press his hands in places he has never touched before, to allow his lips to brush Kageyama’s reddened cheeks, his angered mouth.

He wishes he knew what to do besides sit here in silence. But maybe, just maybe, this is the only thing Kageyama needs—to have someone there for him, to know he’s not alone in this—for him to be comforted.

They don’t move nor say anything during the rest of the evening. Kageyama’s breathing slows down, mellowing; his fingers slacken around his. When Natsuko comes in and asks Hinata to leave, Kageyama is able to meet Hinata’s eyes, if only for a brief instant, thanking him for his presence. He doesn’t look like he’s going to cry any more, which is reassurance enough for Hinata to leave them without feeling useless or with a heavy burden inside him.

Hinata keeps one simple thought with him all through Kageyama’s recovering process: things get bad before they get better. But these days, things have only been getting worse and worse. He doesn’t know how bad things have to be to start improving. He doesn’t know how much more Kageyama will be able to endure before he finally snaps.

Before everything breaks, Hinata gets a glimpse of optimism that assures him Kageyama is finally getting better, if only emotionally. It has taken him a lot of effort and double the visits to his psychologist to get himself back up on his feet with the mentality that he can do this once again, but the poor positivity he grasped is blown into powder with one simple sentence:

“We are going to discharge you this week,” announces his doctor, as formally as one could expect from her. “You’ve progressed consistently in rehabilitation, and you can keep following the treatment from your own home. There’s no need for you to be here.”

Kageyama stares, blankly, unable to whimper a mere sound.

“Of course, you are to keep attending rehabilitation and your doctor’s appointments.”

The doctor’s nails are painted a pearlish pink. Kageyama watches her fingers slot between each other, her thumbs playing around one another uncomfortably enough that he knows her serious façade is a mock.

“But-“ His left hand clutches at his right arm, desperate. “What about my arm?”

“Well. After observing your case these weeks and seeing the progression you’ve made, we are to let you know there is a possibility that you might not recover mobility on some parts of your body.”

Her words are pure terror. There’s a subtlety on her that makes it seem like she’s trying to be uplifting, but her words insinuate something terminating, something final that won’t be undone.

He is not going to recover.

There’s no way he is going to.

His voice quivers with genuine fear. “But I need to be able to move. How am I supposed to play if I can’t-“

“We aren’t saying that you won’t recuperate,” she interrupts. She’s promising something she cannot ensure. “You just need to know that it is a possibility. A big one, in fact. Compared to the rest of your progress, there’s been next to none for your arm. Am I wrong?”

She isn’t wrong. Even if Kageyama complained and insisted and cried out like a dying animal, she’d still be right. He still somehow wishes that by changing their minds, he could change his fate, too.

This cannot be right.

The doctor doesn’t have another word to share with him, and so he flees, unable to face her any longer. It’s not the doctor’s fault, that he’s broken. It’s not his own, either, since he’s been trying with all of his willpower to recover.

It kind of is his fault that he didn’t see the car, or maybe the driver’s for not seeing him either. He’s been wondering, dreaming, with ways in which he could have avoided this. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened, if he had never gone to the national youth camp. Or if he hadn’t taken the wrong subway exit. Or if he hadn’t applied to karasuno. Or if he had never met—

 _No_.

None of it is true. None of it matters. As much regret as he may have, the situation is what it is, and daydreaming about alternating it isn’t going to do it.

And he’s not stupid. He might not be the sharpest person to ever exist, but he knows his body. He knows when there’s something wrong, when there’s something hurt or that needs to be checked. He knows, by the way every other limb, joint and muscle has relearnt to move, and how the pain on them has gradually faded away, that his right arm isn’t going to recuperate.

He knows the pain on his shoulder when he tries to lift his arm or move his fingers isn’t normal. He knows there’s something that’s not working, that his flesh is worn off and rotten, that there’s no way to cure something that is only sleeping.

He knows, yet he hasn’t been able to come to terms with it until now. Probably because everyone lulled him into believing he was going to be okay. Doctors, nurses, friends, family… everyone wanted to fool him into believing he was going to get better. What a bunch of jerks. He would rather have had the truth from the beginning. This torture isn’t fair. It isn’t deserved.

Kageyama doesn’t want to see anyone after he leaves the doctor’s office. He’s utterly, and outright heartbroken, doesn’t know how to deal with the agony that comes crumbling down on him after the doctor’s statement. He wants to be left alone and unbothered, wants to cry himself to sleep, even as lame and pathetic as that sounds to him, yet when he enters his room Hinata is still there, napping the wait away.

Kageyama doesn’t want Hinata by his side anymore. He doesn’t want to tell him he’s not getting better, that there’s probably nothing he can do to heal the part of him that’s broken. Kageyama needs Hinata to leave, to forget about who he is and who he was, to never ask anything from him again. He needs Hinata to stop encouraging him and telling him it’s going to be okay, because now he knows it’s not, that there’s not even a minimal recovery he can gift his friend, that he cannot repay his care and concern at all.

Out of all people in the world, Hinata is the last one Kageyama needs near right now.

He closes the door harder than he intended, needing Hinata awake and out of here, as far away as possible and for as long as they both can endure.

It's the cruelest of ironies that these past months they've grown so attached to each other, that they're trying to go back to the point they were in when Kageyama left and they bid farewell, because right now the only thing Kageyama wants is to push him all the way away, as if they had never even met and their relationship was only a blurry, tiny memory lost within their minds.

He hears rustling by his bed and knows that Hinata is up—his clothed feet hit the floor and a yawn stretches the corner of his lips, fingers scratching mindlessly at his hair.

Kageyama can't look at him right now. Can't look at him, can't have him near, can't stand the pain his presence brings.

He turns around but his head stands low—his eyes don't leave the floor. He starts to step towards his bed—his prison, his shelter—and prays for Hinata to have dissolved into smoke by the time he reaches it.

Hinata is right there when he hops onto the mattress, giving him his back, his eyes a heavy pressure at the back of his head, watching him intently, carefully, with as much love as he has since the accident. Kageyama cannot stand it anymore.

He flinches at the feel of Hinata's knuckles poking his arm, wanting his attention. He's leaning over the bed, an elbow sunk on the mattress, sleepy eyes trying to stay open to see him.

“How'd it go?” he asks, voice small and tender, one of his fingers staying pressed to Kageyama's skin.

Kageyama cannot answer, not with words or with actions, not even with a simple shrug of his shoulder.

Hinata leans further in, pressing his cheek against his shoulder insistently. “Ya-ma!”

Kageyama shrugs away, harsh, without staring at him. “Stop.”

Hinata has grown used to Kageyama’s venom. Sometimes it’s sour, sometimes it’s as tasteless as water. This time it stings and corrodes him, setting off all of his alarms.

He had been able to relax upon seeing Kageyama’s mood lift—if only slightly—after the incident at the start of the past week. It had taken them time and a lot of silent hours to see Kageyama peek out of his shell and to the world around him. Against all tides and strong winds, Kageyama had been able to start walking again (with a much more damaged spirit than before, but renewed stubbornness).

What a fool he had been, believing Kageyama’s mood could do nothing but worsen. How, if he stumbles upon nightmare after nightmare? How, if they are not letting him breathe?

Hinata doesn’t need Kageyama to tell him what he’s been told, because he can see it written all over him. They have been avoiding facing this part of the journey for so long that now Hinata doesn’t know what to do. Kageyama hasn’t told him about all the negative medical stuff, and Hinata hasn’t dared to answer. That was Natsuko’s and Kageyama’s department, and he was wordlessly kept aside.

All this time he’s been kept aside, a jack of all trades for when Kageyama needed an exit to this mess. Hinata accepted his part, afraid he wouldn’t have any other space to fill in Kageyama’s needs, but now it’s all crashing down on him.

“Hey,” he calls, as soothing as he can, trying to imitate Natsuko’s patience. “Everything’s going to-“

“Don’t even _dare_ to finish that sentence!” Kageyama barks at him, enraged. “You don’t know shit!”

Hinata frowns, the sudden outburst wounding him deeper than anticipated. “Kagey-“

Kageyama huffs depreciatingly. “Just shut it, will you?”

Not even when they had their worst fights had Kageyama treated him like this. This rawness, this derogation, is something Hinata had never considered he could feel. Not coming from Kageyama, at least.

“What’s gotten into you?” he asks, his voice thin, barely there.

Kageyama is fuming, clutching at the sheets with one hand, tormenting the muscles of his jaw by clenching it too hard. “Nothing’s gotten into me. You’re just pissing me off.”

“Then you could ask me to _leave_ , asshole.”

“As if you would!” Kageyama’s face twists with disgust, with exasperation. Hinata can feel the way Kageyama’s trying to peel off his skin and claw at his bloody self, hurting him, hurting him, hurting him. “As if you’d leave me the fuck alone!”

Hinata gawks at him, without knowing what he wants to say. “What even– What is _with you_? You know I don’t _have_ to be here, right? That I’m just-“

“Oh, yeah, you’re such a nice person for coming to visit!” Kageyama grunts out, furious. “Thank you so much, Hinata! How very generous of you!”

Hinata fists his hands, taking a step forward. “You little sh—“

“Like you care about anything else than being able to do the quick you love so much. Don’t even try to pretend.”

Hinata’s fury dissolves into nothingness. His mouth opens to retort, but there's not a single word that comes out. His mouth opens and his throat closes, tight, as tight as it does when he wants to cry, crumped with all the words and emotions he wants to express, not knowing which one is the right one, which one hurts him the most.

He wishes Natsuko were here, because she’s the one that deals with Kageyama’s fury and disappointment, the one who controls it best. It doesn’t matter how many times Kageyama treats her like an old rag, or how many times he has to apologize right after, Natsuko deals with his temper in ways Hinata would never imagine of achieving.

He wishes Natsuko were here, for she’d know what to do, whereas he’s completely frozen.

Kageyama faces away from him, hiding his expression. “Don’t come here anymore.”

Hinata’s head is crowded with words he cannot let out. He knows Kageyama is hurting. He really, really does. Knowing that Kageyama is hurting doesn’t help Hinata to forgive him. This is different from the times they bicker at each other at school or on the way home. This is raw and terrible, with a type of honesty that can only be found when one is feeling their worst. Hinata has been hurting, too. He can only take a limited amount of sorrow.

Hinata opens his mouth, a simple, pained word making its way past all the others, past all the deceive and incredulity, past the realization that he who Hinata considers his best friend, his first love, his could have been boyfriend, thinks so low of him:

“Okay.”

“I don't want you to come here,” Kageyama insists, as if Hinata hadn't heard him the first time, as if saying it again would change Hinata's speechless reaction. He's angry at Hinata for his persistence these past few months, but he's also angry that he's not putting a fight at all. “You’re annoying. You’re so fucking annoying, I can’t stand you anymore. I don’t think _anyone_ in this hospital can bear to have you around one more day.”

Hinata's jaw trembles a little. His fingers curl into fists. “I guess.”

Kageyama’s eyes narrow—furious, helpless, terrified. “Stop calling me every passing hour to see if I'm okay. I can’t stand to hear your voice.”

“Got it.”

“Don't–” He doesn't even know what to say. Doesn’t know what to say, what to scream, what to shriek out to let him see he’s in brutal, agonizing pain, that he needs him near and far away and inexistent. He doesn't even know why he's pushing him away on the first place. He knows Hinata doesn’t mind if he doesn’t get better. He knows. He _knows,_ damn. “Don't send me messages.”

“Fine.”

“Don't bother my mom anymore. She has– She has enough going on. She doesn’t need more trouble, and you’re a handful.” Kageyama's chest heaves with every ragged, furious breath. He stares at the floor as if it were the enemy, when the only enemy he has right now is his own, selfish self. “Stop everything you do. I hate having you around.”

There’s a few seconds of silence in which Kageyama tries to come up with another accusation, another order, but nothing comes to his mind. He’s so furious he doesn’t realize the way Hinata’s body has frozen, trembling quietly, painfully, unable to snap out of the shock of Kageyama’s outburst.

For now, all Hinata can do is accept whatever Kageyama is giving. And later, maybe, with a bit of luck and looking back on it, he’ll be able to understand why Kageyama needs to hurt him like this, why he needs to break them apart the way he is now.

Hinata's voice shakes with one last pitiful word. “Fine.”

They stay there for a few more seconds, without staring at each other, both shaking out of control.

Kageyama doesn't move as Hinata grabs his things and silently taps his way outside the hospital, not offering a goodbye or a see you later, without squeezing his wrist or pinching his skin the way he's been doing for the past months, not even glancing his way once.

Hinata leaves in stunned, terrorizing silence, hurting to the deepest ends of his core, leaving Kageyama alone in the cold, too familiar room. Kageyama stares at the floor until the skin at the palm of his hand feels raw and tender from clawing at it, until his vision unblurs and the tears he's called have left unshed.

His mother finds him lying on the bed, curled in a ball and shaking, shaking, shaking, his face pressed to the pillow and blankets thrown over his head.

He wants to tell her to leave, too, wants to say she doesn't have to do this, doesn't have to be here every day looking out for him, doesn't have to miss sleep and be tired at work in the morning, just to see him for a few hours or to pet his hair while he sleeps.

He wants to tell his mom he doesn't need her tenderness or comprehension. He doesn't need her fingers prying the bedsheets off his fist and down to his shoulders, doesn't need her arm around his back nor her forehead pressed to the side of his head, shushing words and hums vibrating into his ear and all the way to the knots in his chest.

Kageyama wants everyone to leave him alone. He wants every single person on Earth to vanish off his life. Or maybe he is the one who should vanish, he doesn't know. He wants everyone to leave and give up on him. However, he's terrifyingly glad his mom stays by his side the rest of the night, taking her shoes off so she can slip into bed with him and cradling him to sleep as if he were a damn kid. And maybe he is a damn little kid with no self-control. If he weren't, he wouldn't have pushed the only person he cherishes and who seems to cherish him out of his life.

* * *

Hinata goes home sobbing.

He doesn’t even get on his bike, too overwhelmed to risk tripping or crashing into something and having an accident himself.

He gets home late. Too late. So late that his mother starts scolding him before he even gets to crack the door open, and then halts suddenly when she sees his face, pulling him in against her chest and wrapping both arms around him, gentle, pressing sweet little words of comfort against his hair, which only make Hinata cry louder.

He wakes up the next day, not knowing how he got into bed, with his little sister curled up next to him and holding his hand. It comforts him to have her there with him, yet it doesn’t.

It doesn’t, because that’s not the person he wants to be next to in that moment, even if he loves her to death and back. She doesn’t comfort him, and he closes his eyes trying to sleep again, wondering if this is what Kageyama feels every time he sees him by his side in the hospital, if he bothers him with his presence, if he’s only hurting him by being there.

Hinata doesn’t want to hurt Kageyama in any possible way, ever, and although he knows he promised to stop going by the hospital to visit Kageyama, he didn’t intend to keep his promise. Everything Kageyama said was a dagger, but Hinata had allowed him to stab him, knowing he needed to get all that hatred out of his chest. Now, taking these new feelings into account, he thinks he might stay true to his word and leave Kageyama alone so Kageyama can come back whenever he feels ready.

Even if that may not happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bruh I'm sorry I've delayed the update for so long, but life hasn't been the easiest for the world, neither for me. But! I haven't forgotten about it, so here you go! And I've also got to say, that if it were for me these days, this story would have been much different and written in a different style/with a different approach. Buuuut I guess y'all are stuck with the long ass descriptions for a while haha


	6. Detours

On a Tuesday morning, the doctor discharges him from the hospital, and Kageyama goes home.

Everything has stayed as he left it. Homework to be done on his desk, folded clothes forgotten on top of his bed, various weights and a volleyball thrown around, ready to be taken.

His home looks exactly as he left it, but he doesn’t belong in it. The Kageyama who lived here is gone. He shouldn’t be allowed inside anymore.

Natsuko stands behind him for a while, holding his luggage, watching. She’s a persistent, heavy presence chasing him, caring and overprotective and relentless, absolutely unlike the person Kageyama used to know her for. He wants to do terrible things to this place—to this room, to this house, to the people who used to live in it and who are not the same any more. He wants to destroy himself until there isn’t a trace of Kageyama Tobio left, for people won’t recognize him anymore, and he won’t even be a vague, lost memory in their minds.

He sleeps in his bed as a foreigner would, touching as little as possible, lost under the blankets which’s smell he can’t recognize, feeling no coziness whatsoever. The darkness is unmoving, but the ceiling still seems to stare back at him during the rest of the night.

Natsuko does most of the talking during the next two weeks, since he has been stunned into silence. She doesn’t say much, anyway, scared her son might combust at some point, forced to explode by the pressure of her words.

Kageyama doesn’t leave the house unless he’s obligated to, and barely gets out of his room. Time slots together, indistinguishable, long and short and interminable, endless, abiding. He’s repeating the same day over and over again, the same mechanical routine, unable to step away from the path that has been forced on him.

He’s so far away from reality than when he gets a glimpse of it, his whole body withdrawals.

Not many people have come visit him—which he’s thankful for, honestly—so when someone stops by their house he doesn’t even bother to try to discover who it is. That’s why, one late afternoon, while he’s sitting on his desk’s chair, staring blankly at the wall, and some shushed chatter reaches his ears after some minutes of happening, his heart leaps into erratic action.

He cracks his door open, if only to confirm the foreign voice belongs to who he thinks it does.

He doesn’t hear much about what his mother says or what’s answered in return, but he doesn’t need more to recognize Hinata. The splinter in between his ribs digs in deeper, aiming for the heart, at the anguish and yearning in Hinata’s words. He starts to push the door closed when he hears his mom announce she’s going to come find him.

He freezes, the rejection ready to spit out of his mouth even before he gets to see her. He steps away from the door, feeling it aflame, untouchable, his only escape blocked. For a brief instant, he considers hiding under his desktop or inside the closet.

Natsuko finds him in the middle of the room, frozen still with the lights turned off and the blinds down, so she springs on the spot when she does turn the light on and sees him right there, unmoving, looking terrified and enraged.

“Tobio,” she says, composing herself. “Hinata-kun is downstairs. He’s come to see how you’re doing, so you should go and say-“

“No,” he spits out, bluntly.

She blinks quickly, eyebrows raised. “No?”

“Why-“ Kageyama breathes in, out, in, out, slowly and profoundly, muscles so tense they’re shaking. “Why did you tell him I’m here? I don’t want to see him.”

Natsuko frowns, at last. “He’s worried about you.”

Kageyama finds himself shouting, louder than the roar in his head, more uncontrollable than the trembling of his limbs; “I don’t care!”

The sudden outburst makes Natsuko lean away from him, careful. She knows Kageyama has been sensitive these past months—that there’s terrors in his head he won’t even speak about—but she doesn’t think she’s ready to watch him drift away from everything that he’s ever loved. She’s been there, before, in so much pain and so obfuscated she wasn’t able to discern the truths from the lies, the right from wrong. She’s been there, alone and unprotected, with no family to help her out, and she’s definitely not allowing her own son to go through it all.

She doesn’t know how to open Kageyama’s eyes, not when she’s feeling upset at the way he’s treating her, and saddened because her memories’ voices are so strong, but she still tries to reach out to him, even when her body doesn’t dare near him. “Tobio.”

Kageyama doesn’t look up; he can barely hear her.

“I know this is hard, but you shouldn’t push your friends away. You don’t want to go through this alone.”

Kageyama clenches his jaw. “You don’t know what I want.”

She stares at him, long and in silence, knowing he’s unreachable right now.

She misses the times when all she needed to do to calm his crying son was place his small head against her chest, for he would hear her heart and not her words, and he would immediately know that he’s okay. He’d understand, through her even pulse, that there was nothing in the world he should fear, since she was there to shield him from all danger.

Now, Kageyama is all grown up, stubborn and independent and unaware of how he doesn’t know anything at all, even if he thinks he does. He’s built a thousand walls around himself, with all the knowledge he thinks he needs, and he’s not going to allow anyone to go in. She wishes—she _hoped_ —that someone his age, someone familiar and who he’s close to, would be able to go inside the fortress. How is anyone supposed to have access to him when he’s like this?

“You may think that going through this alone is easier,” she states, looking him in the eyes, “but it’s only going to cause you more suffering. I won’t force you to see your friends, though. I can’t force you to do that.”

She lingers by the door a few more seconds. Her hand looses around the doorknob, her breath finally comes out, dragging, tired. She leaves without another word, leaving the door closed behind her.

Kageyama doesn’t move from his spot, staring at the patch of light that seeps through the open door into his room. He stays, unable to move, yet he trembles a little when he hears his mother delivering his message to Hinata, if only with sweeter words.

“I’m sorry, Shouyou, he’s not going to come down. He hasn’t been feeling very well.”

And when Hinata’s voice reaches him, shaky and small, choked up like he’s about to cry, saying, “Oh, okay. I understand. Yeah, um- Sorry I bothered you,” Kageyama closes his eyes.

He closes his eyes, ignores his mother’s voice saying, “Hinata-kun, you don’t need to-“; and Hinata’s, too, when he speaks one last time before leaving, “No, no, it’s- It’s fine. I’m sorry I showed up like this.”

“Shou-kun…”

“Please, take care of him.”

“Of course, dear.”

The front door closes. The front door closes, his feet stay rooted on the floor, and Hinata leaves his life for good. He allows Hinata to leave for good.

* * *

It takes Kageyama another two months to go back to school.

He spends the time between rehabilitation and the depths of his bed, depths he hadn’t got to know so up and personal yet, and he kind of wishes he hadn’t. He doesn’t want his home to be there. However, he doesn’t know how to find another one.

Most parts of his body have recuperated their full functionality, even if his arm has stayed as inert as when he woke up. He’s slowly coming to terms with the fact that it’ll probably never move again. Or, rather, he’s coming to terms with the knowledge that he _has_ to come to terms with it, since he’s still not ready.

He hasn’t told anyone about his arm. That’s why, every single morning, he puts on a sling he doesn’t need, for his arm doesn’t hurt nor needs immobilization, and leaves for school, without rush nor motivation, knowing there’s nothing waiting there for him.

The first day upon coming back, he had to see Hinata’s eyes meeting his as if they didn’t know him, the smile that started to grow on his lips that Hinata killed in an axe blow, and how his head canted down and away from him where he was hidden at the other side of the hallway, between a bunch of students. Kageyama lost sight of him before he could dare to look away from him.

Fortunately for him, Hinata was in a different class than his. That didn’t save him from having other members of the club stop by to check on him, nor having to come up with excuses as to why he didn’t want to talk to them, or why he had to leave immediately. With time, the team learns that he’s unapproachable, and they start coming to look for him. It almost seems like they’ve disappeared from the school, since he doesn’t even cross paths with them anymore.

There’s times when a little part of him wishes they came by and talked to him. There’s times when he hates that he’s pushed them away. Then he remembers why he had to, and the doors trying to unlock inside him knock themselves back shut, irreparably, held hostages by his own fear.

After a while, though, his new routine starts to overwhelm him in all the wrong ways, rotting in all the wrong places, and Kageyama finds himself unconsciously making his way to the gym, needing to see everyone again, needing to smell the burn of their shoes, the waxed floors, the leather of the balls. He needs to see the brightness of the ceiling, its ugly color, the incessant movement of bodies; hear the voices, the squeaking of soles, the huffs and grunts and victory claims; feel the heat of practice, his pulse accelerating with the motion, his fingertips seeking out the sharp burn of the tosses.

He doesn’t know what he’ll feel when he sees everyone again, but he goes anyway, with his jacket covering the cast that immobilizes his dead arm, and his good hand gripping the strap of his bag.

He goes, and it breaks his heart to see how well they are doing, how much he wants to be among them tossing to Tanaka, stopping one of Asahi’s spikes, running and jumping with everyone, putting his skill—skill he doesn’t have anymore—to good use. He stares, agape, as they change positions over and over, switching in and out of the court, then hitting some spikes while the other side of the net stops them. He stares as Nishinoya jumps and tosses to the ace, at Suga taking his position with the opposite team, at the spikers receiving Suga’s tosses with ease and comfort. He stares at Hinata longer than he stares at anyone else. He watches him smacking down the ball with practiced ease, as fast and energetic as he always is, clapping Suga’s hands with his own because that spike was good, that spike was _perfect_ , and Kageyama isn’t in the giving end anymore.

He watches for a while, unnoticed, crushed by the resignation that, as much as he didn’t want to accept it, his team doesn’t need him to function at all. _Hinata_ doesn’t.

He’s only starting to think about leaving when Yachi spots him and calls him in, saying she’s glad to see him. Kageyama visibly flinches away when she approaches, not wanting anyone’s attention on him.

He blurts out a quick apology to _flight_ , a first pair of eyes from the team making their way towards him, then a second, then a few more as the first witness calls his name. He panics for more reasons than he’d like to admit, body moving away faster than one’d think possible when his mind is this hazed. He panics and he flees, terrified, ashamed.

Yachi tries to stop him, tries to make him stay, tries to let him know that it’s okay, that he doesn’t need to run away from them anymore, that they miss him and want him around, but Kageyama doesn’t listen. He doesn’t listen to what she has to say, doesn’t care that she thinks he shouldn’t feel disposable and weak and humiliated, doesn’t care that everyone wants him around for a laugh when he wants to be around for a fight. He doesn’t care that someone else calls his name, doesn’t care when he hears distant mumbling and a pair of people saying he needs time.

He doesn’t care, and so he flees.

He flees, because apparently he’s a coward, and he’s angrier than he would have ever thought he’d be due to their compassion, due to his incapability of facing them when he’s in this state.

Yachi apologies in his name, although no one is angry at him. They really aren’t, and maybe Kageyama should know. Maybe he needs their approval, their comprehension, their affection. But maybe what he needs is their refusal, maybe he needs to be needed, to know that he’s not disposable, that up until now he was the best they could have, and there’s no one who could fill in his space. And maybe, just maybe, Kageyama needs all of it, for all the empty holes in his body would be filled and cleansed, and all the wounds he has infected could start to cicatrize.

Hinata is the last one remaining by the door, watching as Kageyama steps further and further away, his heart a tiny little taut thing in his chest.

He calls Kageyama before he’s too far away from the gym, without knowing what he intends to say, or if he can say anything at all. With the way Kageyama’s been acting during the past months, and after the way he broke Hinata out of his life, Hinata doesn’t know how to tell him he’s waiting, how to tell him that no matter how much time passes while he heals, he’ll be waiting right there for him.

Kageyama doesn’t stop—doesn’t want to face Hinata, doesn’t want to feel him near, doesn’t want his brightness and his gentleness and his energy, and above all doesn’t want to know that Hinata doesn’t need him anymore.

He doesn’t want Hinata anywhere near him, yet his body halts as Hinata calls out his name, exalted and a little desperate, needing him here.

“Kageyama!” Hinata reaches out to him, not daring to step out of the gym, not wanting to invade his personal space or make him any more upset. Kageyama doesn’t turn, but he stops. He stops, and that propels Hinata to say: “Come back as soon as possible, yeah?”

Kageyama knows Hinata means well—somewhere deep in his heart he knows—yet what Hinata tells him hits all the wrong places, all the wounds and cuts and scars and bruises, opening him up and making him spurt out buckets of blood.

He clenches his fists, his jaw, walks away without a word, without a mere glance Hinata’s way, thinking that maybe, if he sees any hope or any encouragement in Hinata’s eyes, he will directly, straight up combust.

Hinata watches him go. He can’t feel hopeful that Kageyama will get better while watching him push everyone away. He can’t know how he’s feeling while at distance, while keeping himself out of Kageyama’s way so he doesn’t disturb or hurt him. He doesn’t know if Kageyama will eventually come back or at all. It’s infuriating and heartbreaking and that’s all he can do for now: wait, watch from afar, and hope. For the best, for a little better, for _something more_ than what Kageyama is giving them now.

Kageyama disappears from view, and Hinata wonders if the tension in his belly will be soothed away any time soon, or even at all. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s got the feeling that Kageyama isn’t going to come back. He sees it written all over Kageyama’s body, all over his face, even if he wants to lull himself into believing this is due to the shock Kageyama must be feeling after the accident. He wants Kageyama’s rejection and hatred to be temporal, although his senses warn him they’re going to stay within him for the long run.

He’s devastated when he finds out that he was right, because by the end of first year, Kageyama and Hinata don’t even see each other anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One note: if I had known anything about canon manga after nationals, some of these things would have probably been different to match canon, but YIKES, I started writing this long before the nationals arc finished.


	7. The wings we had

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, the opening to this was RUSHED. But I just-- I just wanted to finish the chapter already!!! This is--
> 
> I can't really tell you so go ready it! (I'm fully correcting this tomorrow, bc it's really late, but there aren't supposed to be any major changes).

These days, the world seems to be painted in shades of gray. Maybe because it’s winter, maybe because he can’t think in color anymore.

The past two years have slotted together. This is all he’s had: rehab that’s not helping him and that he wants to abandon; anger so deep and corroding that his body doesn’t have anything in it anymore; and silence, solitude—imposing and wrecking and deserved, so very deserved—since Kageyama doesn’t have friends anymore.

Days have passed in silence.

He hasn’t heard from the old team since he left them without a word for farewell. The only person he sometimes talks to is Yachi. Yachi, because she’s always been nice and friendly to him, because she doesn’t ask questions or lectures him, because she doesn’t slip in a comment about how he should hang around with the team sometime, or how everyone misses him, or how the new kids are silly yet great, and Kageyama has an easier time breathing around her than in any other place.

She has been the only person to not completely leave his side. And he has tried. He has tried to push her away, to make her understand he doesn’t need her to keep him company, or to help him study, or to fill in the constant silence of his daily life. She knows she’s not wanted or welcome, and that hasn’t stopped her from trying, from coming and going every time Kageyama thinks he’s pushed every lasting person out of his life.

In all honesty, he’s glad she’s been stubborn enough to stay. He doesn’t think he would have survived without her kindness. And, in the end, she’s the only thing that remains from his beloved past, the bridge between him and every person he grew to love and appreciate on his first year of high school.

He knows he’s selfish. He knows Yachi shouldn’t have to put up with his resentment, his denial, his blinding pain. He knows if he lost her he wouldn’t have anything left. He wouldn’t have a reason to stay.

It takes a lot of courage and patience for him not to think about the team. He doesn’t want to remember their voices, the things they’ve said to him, the emotions they spur in his belly. The memory of a pat on the back, the smell of Ukai’s pork buns after practice in winter, someone’s head resting on his shoulder on the way back after a match, a hand gripping his out of everyone’s view—

He doesn’t think of them.

When he does, his mind always leads to one place. A place he has to avoid. There’s someone waiting there for him, someone who meant the world to him and who he has tried to destroy, whom he cannot face anymore.

It was a challenge as much as it was an obstacle, to keep himself at distance from all of them. Everywhere he looked, he saw a poster for the volleyball team, or a familiar face, or a glimpse of orange hair. That’s why in the middle of his second year he changed schools. He didn’t have to see anyone anymore. He didn’t have to be careful where he went or where he looked, because they wouldn’t be there. There was no volleyball team he could stalk in his free time. There was nothing there to remind him of what he loved, of what devoured him inside out.

Upon leaving, he grew empty. He didn’t dare make friends, nor did he think he was going to be capable of handling a friendship. If he had been a terrible friend when he was in middle school, he had to be a hundred times worse now.

If there comes a day when he can see his old karasuno teammates in person without breaking down afterwards, he’ll know he has succeeded.

And now, it’s been two years since he left karasuno; a few months after he finished highschool.

The members of the team stopped bothering him after one month of silence from his part. _He needs time_ , they probably thought. _He needs space_ , Hinata would have surely confirmed. Yet it’s been two years, and all this time and space is suffocating him, burying him in places where no one would be able to find him.

By his mother’s request, he has started to consider dedicating the rest of his life to something— _anything_ —100% unrelated to what his life was originally meant to lead him. But that’s about as far as he can get: consideration. Considering moving on, considering a future for himself, considering life again.

He considers, when he receives the invitation, to accept to go to Yachi’s birthday party that weekend.

He knows it’ll be a small gathering, who’ll be there, that he’s not welcome, and yet…

And _yet_.

And yet, after two whole years of meandering through this empty, everlasting space where he hid himself, he’s found a tiny opening. He can’t see through to the other side of whatever this space is, but he can hear voices. Voices, loud and chatty and bright, and above all them there’s the beating of his heart, his pulse, asking _please go_ , crying out _please stop this_.

(He doesn’t know why he says yes.)

The mere thought of seeing any of his old friends terrifies him. Yachi never told him who would go—a part of him unconsciously prays every day that no one from karasuno does—but that doesn’t stop him from overthinking. He has to see them, yet he can’t bring himself to do it. He can’t bring himself to be brave, to be bold, and he knows he has to move on, to make clear that he’s okay and that they’re not part of each other’s lives anymore, yet he’s shocked still by the mere memory of their faces. He can’t move, can’t think, it’s—

It’s the weekend, and he’s knocking at Yachi’s door.

He freezes up by her door, head screaming _run away run away run away_ , and legs as still as his arm has been since the accident.

His mouth opens, and only a choked out sound makes it out, when—thankfully—Yachi opens the door.

“Kageyama-kun! I’m so glad you made it!” She smiles at him, sweet as always, and makes room for him.

Kageyama stares at her entrance, the sound inside the house turning to a loud buzzing in his head. He stares, in dread, asks, “Is there… Yachi-san, is—“

“It’s okay,” she says, reassuring. Her eyes meet his, unmoving. And it’s so weird, to have Yachi holding his eyes like this, as if for once he were the scared animal who needed comfort, and not the other way around. “Nothing to worry about. It’ll be okay.”

Kageyama swallows, thickly. He doesn’t— He can’t—

Yachi’s smile doesn’t waver; “Do you trust me?”

A few seconds too late, Kageyama nods. He makes it into the house in safety, and is all too glad to find no familiar faces among the small crowd.

He can recognize two girls from Yachi’s class, and a guy from the neighborhood, but the other two kids are completely unknown to him. He nods at all of them, awkward. They wave back, and he hates, hates, _hates_ , that press of lips on one of the girls, _hates_ to read it as pity, as knowledge, as if she were keeping a secret from everyone else. He has no idea if the girl knows about what happened to him, but he makes sure to avoid her as much as possible.

He stands by a corner as everyone chats, watching them awkwardly, and relaxing the muscles of his jaw the few moments Yachi spares him a glance or a word, or even a whole sentence. The two other guys try to hold a conversation with him, and soon find out it’s useless.

He sighs the moment he gets to give them all his back when he’s asked to take the drinks to the dining table. He feels a hand on his shoulder and tenses again, even when he sees that it’s Yachi by his side.

She asks, “Everything okay?”

Kageyama nods. “How come— Home come no one’s here?”

“You mean the team?” She tilts her head, and smiles after he nods. “Well, I know Tsukishima and Yamaguchi are studying for their university entrance exams, they’re next week, so they couldn’t make it.”

 _Okay_ , Kageyama thinks. _But what about everyone else? What about_ him _?_

“And, look, later on—“ The bell rings, and she stops. She looks back with an apologetic smile that Kageyama _dreads_ , says, “It’ll be okay, yeah? Just… talk. Please.”

He almost drops the drinks as he watches her go.

It’s like witnessing a miracle, or seeing a ghost from a past life walk by well and alive, when he sees Hinata enter the house behind some random kid. He freezes yet again, unable to stare away, and stops breathing altogether when Yachi walks them into the house. Hinata catches sight of him and, for one too many seconds, he stands there—miles and miles and miles away—staring in silence.

Then, Hinata turns away, and the noise comes.

Hinata’s turned away as if Kageyama had never even existed. And maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he doesn’t exist for Hinata anymore. What a great discovery. How wonderful, to even consider that Hinata has easily moved on from him, from this, whatever that may be. And isn’t that what he came here for? Closure? To know he could be someone else outside karasuno’s watch, and away from the bonds he had with them?

Hinata’s ability to fit right into a group of strangers is admirable. He’s the undeniable heart of the party, making everyone’s faces light up when they had only darkened when Kageyama was nearby. Or maybe they’re not strangers to him, and Kageyama doesn’t know. How would he know anything about him, if he left him in his past?

It isn’t just Hinata’s voice, though, what fills the quietness. It’s everyone’s, coming together instead of clashing against each other. It’s the music coming from the speakers, loud and happy. It’s the laughs, the jokes, the things Kageyama missed and can’t be a part of.

At some point, the kid that came in with Hinata approaches his spot in the kitchen—has he ever even left this kitchen?—looking for a cup of something, and smiles at him.

“Hey, I know you,” he says, excited. “You were in karasuno a few years ago, right?”

Kageyama seems to see him for the first time. The boy might be a first year, probably one of Yachi’s and Hinata’s junior, and is wearing one of karasuno’s volleyball team’s jacket.

Of course people would know about him. _Of course_. He had always tried to outshine everyone else with his skills. Now his skills are gone, and the focus comes back to him for all the wrong reasons. If he could change into someone else, someone with different skin, different face, he would. Maybe he wouldn’t attract everyone’s attention towards him. Maybe Hinata would have walked past, without acknowledging him, and later on would have included him in the group of people the way he so naturally does. Maybe they could be friends again. Maybe Kageyama would be free of all chains.

“You were an amazing setter!” the boy continues, as if he didn’t see that Kageyama’s absolutely petrified. “We must have watched yours and Hinata’s quick a million times. I’m a setter, too, by the way.”

“I- I see,” he mumbles, eyes on the boy’s neck, as if he wouldn’t notice he can’t stare him on the face.

“I’ve tried matching Hinata’s speed, but it’s impossible,” he chuckles. He presses the mouth of the plastic cup on his lower lip, laughing to himself. (Kageyama _detests_ the lack of formality as he speaks about Hinata.) “I mean, not _impossible,_ but really hard. Hinata is amazing.”

“I know,” he spits out, now staring up at him. “I was his setter.”

“Y-Yeah.” The boy chuckles again. He scratches at his jaw, awkwardly. “No one could believe what happened when they told us. It’s a shame, ‘cause you were great.”

Kageyama isn’t aware of Hinata’s and Yachi’s eyes on them, on how half the cheeriness of the conversation has left to pay them attention. Kageyama can’t even feel the tension in his muscles as he straightens up, menacingly, to look down at the boy.

“A shame,” he repeats, angered.

The boy holds up a hand, ashamed. “I mean… not a _shame_ , just… Really unfortunate, I guess. I don’t know what I would have done if—“

“You should probably shut it.”

The boy’s eyes meet his. He presses his mouth on a tight line, looking away, and mumbles something that sounds like an apology, like remorse, and Kageyama won’t accepting it. If this kid _dares_ to judge him, to _ridicule_ him, then he better have the guts to stand up to his rage. Because he should have seen it coming. He should—( _I don’t know what I would have done)_ —because his pain is obvious, bare for everyone’s eyes, covered in an untamed fury.

“Well, I’ll— I’ll just go back—“

“Nishimoto,” comes Hinata’s voice, as he approaches. “Is everything alright?”

Kageyama thinks, _he asked him, he asked him, he asked_ him. _He isn’t the one being attacked right now._

“Yeah, it’s alright.” Nishimoto smiles at both of them. “Don’t worry.”

“Because if he’s giving you a hard time—“

“ _I’m_ giving him a hard time?” he protests, louder than expected. It’s the first time he talks to Hinata in years, and he’s done so out of anger. What a great evening, indeed. “ _He_ came to talk to me.”

Hinata frowns at him, with a type of loathing he had never seen on his face—neither directed at him, nor at anyone else. “If you have a problem—“

“No, it’s—“ Nishimoto interferes. “It’s my fault. I was being inconsiderate.”

“Still, he doesn’t have to look at you like _that_.”

Nishimoto seems to be about to start shaking with panic. He looks between Hinata and Kageyama, quickly, but none of them are directing their eyes at him. They’re in their own little world of enmity, their own league of hostility—one that comes from an extensive knowledge of each other, one that was broken and stepped on repeatedly, incessantly.

“Don’t talk to him like that again,” Hinata warns him. “He was trying to be polite.”

“Well, he _failed_.”

Hinata’s voice lowers; “Why do you have to treat people like this?“

“Like _what_?”

“Like shit!” Hinata spits out.

Nishimoto tries to interfere again, “I promise it wasn’t—“

And away, Yachi’s panicked plea, “Guys, don’t—“

But Kageyama is furious. He’s furious at himself, at the world, at what he’s done and what he’s lost, at how he hasn’t seen Hinata in years and he doesn’t know him anymore, he doesn’t, he _won’t_ — “What is your problem?”

Hinata’s nostrils flare. “ _You_ are! You can’t talk to people like that!”

Kageyama’s teeth grit together. “Next time he should shut his mouth, then.”

“And maybe you should grow the fuck up!” Hinata retorts, hushing everyone into silence.

The music keeps playing somewhere off in the background—too happy, too energetic, too _annoying_. Kageyama can feel everyone’s attention on him, the humiliation heavy and sour through his veins. His own eyes are trying to pierce holes in Hinata’s, trying to pry them away from him. Hinata is stubborn as ever, though, stronger and bolder than Kageyama has ever known him, without apparent will to back away or lose this unspoken battle.

At times like this, Kageyama wishes he could hate Hinata. He wishes to look at him with hatred, with abhorrence, perhaps with absolute indifference, in a way that cuts him off his life clean and harmlessly. But having him this near, facing him without fear, he can only remember the times he’s hurt him, how he mistreated him, how he loved him in silence. He can’t be in the same room as Hinata—he wants him closer, further away, in his life, completely and absolutely inexistent, gone, present, forgotten. He doesn’t even deserve to interact with him, to be the center of his attention the way he is now, to even hear his voice directed at him.

Without half a dozen people watching, Kageyama would have probably stood his ground a little longer, could have answered something back. As he hears the girls start to whisper in each other’s ears and a depreciating snort from one of the unknown kids, he decides he’s had enough. Enough party, enough Hinata, enough of making a fool of himself, just by being here with everyone.

Without a word, without much of a noise, without his godforsaken _coat_ , he takes his cue to leave.

He realizes he’s not prepared to face the cold of the street all too late, when the doors of the building’s portal close behind him.

The heat of the moment had stupefied his cells enough that he didn’t notice the drastic lowering of the temperature when he exited Yachi’s apartment. Now, standing in the street with little less than a thin sweater, an undershirt and his single responding arm to wrap across his chest to warm him, he realizes his mistake. He considers coming back for a split second—the split second it takes him to imagine everyone’s mocking and judging faces upon seeing him again—before he’s walking all too stiff, all too cold, towards the bus stop, groaning to himself.

When he sits on the bench, his whole body springs on the spot, frozen still by the metal of the seat. He grunts to himself, rubbing furiously at his arm to try and conserve some of his body heat. He checks the timetable of his bus to know how long he has left—or if he will even _survive_ in this cold—and whines pitifully to himself when he sees he’s still got over ten minutes of wait until the bus gets here.

A minute of unbearable wait has passed when something soft and huge falls—or rather, is _thrown_ —on top of him. He makes an awful chocked sound, startled off his seating, and watches what can only be his coat slip off his head and body and to the ground, revealing a very angry, very silent Hinata a few strides away from him.

Kageyama gapes at him a few seconds before he throws his hand out and puts the coat on, muttering an intelligible and ungrateful, “Thanks.”

“Whatever,” Hinata mumbles, bothered. “ _Jerk_.”

Kageyama throws him a quick death glare. If he weren’t concentrated in warming his body and zipping the coat up to his chin, he would emphasize his annoyance a few seconds longer. But he’s freezing, practically dead on the spot. He doesn’t care what Hinata thinks anymore, or what he wants. He just needs to warm up.

This is the first time Hinata has seen Kageyama without the sling for his arm.

It’s the first time he can confirm with his very own eyes, after all those tries in rehab and whatever happened after Kageyama pushed him away, that Kageyama can’t, for the life of him, move his right arm. He has to help himself to slip the unmoving limb into its sleeve, pulling the coat up to rest on his shoulder and then, quickly, fit his left hand into the opposite, empty hole. He also zips it with only one hand, using three fingers to keep the cloth still while the other two push the zipper up inch by inch.

It isn’t a pleasant view.

It isn’t a pleasant thought, to know how much Kageyama must have been hurting—enough to leave them all, enough to leave everything behind—to know himself useless, irrelevant. Hinata never understood Kageyama’s position and probably never will. He never knew how to help him. Kageyama doesn’t need nor want him, and he can’t stop himself from trying, from going back to him. He’s been away from his life for long enough. There’s no way to endure the distance anymore.

He’s still angry. He’s so angry he could punch Kageyama on the face, unwarned, although that wouldn’t solve anything. Although that’d only make Kageyama hate him even more.

“So?” he tries, hoping he can make Kageyama, at least, _look_ at him. “Won’t even say a word?”

Kageyama shrugs him off, facing away. His indifference might hurt more than all the hatred he could give him. If Kageyama hated him, it’d mean he’s still important to him. In all the wrong ways, but _important_. Right now, Kageyama doesn’t care about him. If he’s here, if he isn’t… Kageyama doesn’t give a shit. That hurts more than all the loathing and malice in the world. More than knowing that the person who used to be closest to him, the one he cherished and wanted to openly love, has twisted their relationship this way.

Maybe, and even though Hinata cannot see, if Kageyama cared _less_ , he would be able to face him and act like the human being he is supposed to be. Maybe, if he didn’t know how bad he’s treated him, or the damage he’s caused him. Maybe, if here weren’t a selfish coward.

“Do you plan to stand there all night or _what_?” Kageyama grunts out, not knowing what else to do to make him leave.

Hinata groans, loudly, rolling his eyes so hard his whole head moves with it. He turns to leave, but stops after the first two steps, throwing both fists by his sides.

“No, you know what?” He spins toward Kageyama again, a death sentence in his eyes directed at Kageyama and Kageyama only. In just two strides he’s in front of him, looking down into his stunned face. Kageyama tries to compose himself, tries to look back as intensely, but the truth is: he’s a little scared of what might come out of Hinata’s mouth. “You’ve got some _nerve_ to just pop up here after all this time. How even _dare_ you!”

Kageyama stares at him in silence. Hinata looks away from him, exasperated. He’s unleashing the wrath Kageyama could see him struggle with back in the party. He doesn’t have anything, nor anyone, to stop him now. They don’t have to fake it, to conceal it, to make it look prettier and less damaging than it feels or is.

Kageyama has been waiting years to hear this. If he had had Hinata’s fury back in the day—back in the hospital room, _their_ hospital room, where they bonded and broke apart—it would have been easier for him to let go. Maybe, after Hinata breaks him today, he can finally move on. Maybe both of them will.

“You disappear without a word—you _move out of school_ without telling absolutely anyone—and you _dare_ to come here as if nothing had happened? Without a stupid warning? You– You’re so selfish!” Hinata’s voice wavers with his emotions, going from rage to shock, to sorrow, to disbelief and frustration. “Do you even _care_ what you’ve done to us? Do you know how much you’ve-!”

Hinata stops talking. Not because he doesn’t have anything else to say, but because he cannot continue without exposing how fucked up, how vulnerable, he’s become because of him. Kageyama broke him long, long ago, with no intention of ever putting the pieces he stole back where they were, leaving him empty and incomplete in the process. Kageyama never thought Hinata would need him—neither his presence nor his apologies. He didn’t think he would be this affected, not after seeing how happy he was in the party, but he guesses he was wrong. He cut all the wounds on Hinata’s skin. He shattered the unbreakable, turned him into someone he isn’t.

And he hates himself for it. More than Hinata will ever be able to understand.

He pushes his chin against the collar of his coat so he can hide half of his face against the cloth, frowning. “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known you were here.”

Hinata’s face drops. The rage mitigates, his open wounds afloat. “Is that– Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

Kageyama’s scowl deepens. He nuzzles his face further into the collar of his coat. “No.”

Hinata startles Kageyama by kicking his shin—hard, furious. “What the _fuck_ is wrong with you!?”

“Why’d you do that!?” Kageyama bends the damaged leg towards him and rubs at the spot Hinata has kicked, feeling his skin throb in pain. “Are you stupid?”

Hinata’s hands are fisted by his sides. He’s not looking at him. Kageyama thinks he cannot face him any longer—the unusual wetness and redness of his eyes is proof enough to him.

He looks away, too, so the silence can invade everything, including their minds. Hinata is shaking a stride away from him, quieting his unsteady feelings, the raw emotions he has hidden for years in order for Kageyama, and only Kageyama, to see. Kageyama doesn’t know why Hinata feels the necessity to wrap this up, or maybe to heal them. He doesn’t owe Kageyama anything at all. He _doesn’t_ , damn it. Why, after all this time, is he still attached to him? Hasn’t Kageyama hurt him enough? What _else_ should he do for Hinata to give up on him?

 _Ah,_ he thinks, bitterly. _He doesn’t know how to let go, either._

It’s pretentious to even think about it—and a hundred other things—but Kageyama was in love with him until not long ago. They liked each other. They probably still do. Shit, romantic feelings involved or not, Hinata meant the whole wide universe to him. He hasn’t been able to change that fact even as much as he has tried.

If he focuses hard enough, he can pretend Hinata isn’t there. He directs his eyes to the bus that’s approaching— _finally_ —and waits until it has reached the stop to stand up, ignoring Hinata’s presence as much as he can.

He walks past Hinata and toward the opening door of the vehicle, knowing he has to leave and slash them apart irrevocably, and knowing that this is the only chance he has stumbled upon to turn the tables and fix everything he ruined. He knows he could stay, yet he’s so freaking ready to finally leave. To get out of here, of this mental state he’s drowning in.

He wishes Hinata would make the decision of leaving for him. This is what he’s been looking for years: closure, an ending, their final farewell. And yet, he can’t muster up to take the bus and go.

The bus waits a few more seconds before it starts and drives off into the distance, taking the agonizing noise of its motor with it. Kageyama is giving Hinata his back, and so is Hinata to him, he thinks. They’re two solar systems apart from each other, hearts unrelenting, simultaneously reaching out and away, yet this is still the closer they’ve had each other in years.

He wants to reach back—back in time, in space, to the point when they were almost one.

Instead, this moment is what he has. Awkward, freezing, an inert blizzard.

The end of their time.

If there’s one thing Hinata doesn’t know how to do, is to give up on the things and people that are important to him. He may not know how to communicate with Kageyama anymore (he could be a totally different person for all he knows… he probably is) but he is not leaving. Not yet. Not until he understands _why_. Why Kageyama would abandon him, why would he leave and now stay and confuse him all the damn time, why’d he never do what Hinata expects him to.

He licks his lips to wet them, eyes angled down, staring at nothing. “Was that your bus?”

Kageyama waits one, two, three long seconds. Then, “yeah.”

There’s another twenty seconds of silence, in which Hinata waits for Kageyama to speak. Kageyama doesn’t tell him anything—doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to be breathing. He’s giving him the chance to explain himself, and the idiot isn’t bold enough to take it. Or maybe he doesn’t want to. Hinata isn’t capable of understanding him anymore.

“You should have taken it,” he mutters—deceived, tired.

“And you should go back to the party.”

That sounds more like a menace than a suggestion. And Hinata knows. He really does.

He knows Kageyama doesn’t want him near. He’s been nothing but a nuisance and a bother to him, the source of his uneasiness. He knows he has no place and no right to be by Kageyama’s side. Shit, hasn’t Kageyama made that clear.

Hinata knows his place in Kageyama’s life. He knows, and he’s been hoping for two years and a half that something in Kageyama’s routine, in his new-found misery, would make him want to seek him out, to send him a single-worded message, to leave white noise and an unsteady breath in his voicemail. He has waited for a mail with Kageyama’s address and an invitation to come over, bag of pastries in hand and a videogame in his bag, ready to make up for the lost time. A signal, a hint, a message hidden somewhere in the silence Kageyama forced between them.

He has asked Yachi for everything she knew, knowing she was the only bridge to reach him. He couldn’t obtain more from her than a few hints that Kageyama was considerably okay, fine, a little unambitious, seemingly lifeless, copying however he could. Alive, at least. Carrying on.

It has been difficult for him to put through it all, too. It’s been hard to keep his feelings and their memories alive when all he has wanted is some sort of relief, to be finally free of this unyielding pressure in his chest.

“I thought-“ His mouth opens before he has the chance to think his words though, to consider their implications, the embarrassing desperation obvious in them. “I thought you’d come back, after some time.”

Kageyama’s jaw clenches. He should have taken the bus. “How was I _supposed_ to?”

Hinata turns to him and eyes him up and down. “We all wanted you back.”

“You were too _overwhelming_ ,” Kageyama grits out, not knowing how to phrase his feelings.

“How could we have possibly—!”

“I don’t mean _them_ ,” Kageyama snaps. “I mean _you_. You’re _too much_!”

Hinata takes a menacing step towards him, nearing an edge he can only feel, an edge to a cliff he won’t be able to climb if he ever falls. “The literal _only_ thing I ever did was play videogames and watch movies with you. I didn’t– I didn’t _ask_ or _talk_ about all the medical shit you hated! How’s that supposed to be overwhelming?”

“Well then, maybe you should have forced me to, okay?” Kageyama half turns toward him, but his eyes cannot meet his. He cannot see his face—the denial, the longing, the possible rejection. “Maybe I needed to talk about it!”

Hinata breathes in deep, furious, struck by something that could potentially be guilt. He won’t allow Kageyama to make him feel guilty. He was _there for him_ , for fuck’s sake. “I can’t read your stupid mind. If you wanted to talk then you could have talked to me. It’s as simple as that.”

“You didn’t even give me a day to breathe or be by myself, I couldn’t even figure out what the fuck I needed!” He gestures with his hand to nowhere in particular, irritated, as if he could grasp the words floating in the air; as if he could find the right ones amongst all the wrong, terribly cruel ones. “You were just _always_ there! You were putting all this pressure on me–“

“I was trying to let you know you weren’t alone in this, you massive idiot!”

Kageyama spins towards him and their eyes meet. Hinata looks furious, but no amount of his fury could tackle down or overtake Kageyama’s. He’s just... devastated. Utterly and undeniably devastated.

Part of Hinata’s impetus flickers when he realizes he’s not going to get through to Kageyama—not like this, not with these words. When Kageyama speaks again, Hinata thinks, _that’s it_ , there’s no coming back from this. There’s no way to get to him. This tall, tall wall between them will remain untouched, unbreached, no matter how hard he scrapes and jabs at it.

“All you wanted was for me to get better and go back to school and play again, as if _I_ didn’t want all that, but I’m just- Shit, I’m _not_ going to get better, how could I tell you that? That’s just too much pressure to bear!”

“Of course I wanted you to get better, and of course I want to keep playing with you, but even if you didn’t get better then that– That wouldn’t change anything.”

Hinata takes a few deep breaths. He knew Kageyama’s spirit had been lost in very dark places, but he had never expected to be dragged along into its darkness. He didn’t expect Kageyama to think so low of him or his intentions.

“It’s like-“ He looks down at the floor, trying to take control over the trembling of his voice, of his limbs, of his breathing—failing miserably at it. “It’s like you don’t know me at all. You were supposed to be my friend.”

Kageyama knows him. He knows him better than he would have ever wished or planned to.

Kageyama knows that Hinata worries with every lasting beat of his heart, even for him, even as damaged as he was, and that’s something Kageyama couldn’t bear to know. He couldn’t bear Hinata’s careful comfort, unable to pay him back with any minimal recovery. He wanted to stand by Hinata’s side until the end of times, and he wasn’t going to be able to. Not anymore.

He knows Hinata more than he deserves to. He knows when he prefers pork buns and when he’d rather have takoyaki. He knows about his family, about his friends, about the people that went missing and the people who refused to stay. He knows the way his fingers loop around his laces when he ties his shoes before a game, and how he packs his sweaty uniform after a match with absolute no care, too tired to even bother to fold it.

He knows to detail the rhythm to which Hinata’s chest moves when he’s sleeping, how his cheeks flush red after being exposed directly to the sun for too long, how his hands feel against his, how many freckles he has covering his shoulders and the way his knuckles bruise after a match. He knows that he changes his shampoo during summer because he smells like lemon and mint, while the rest of the year he smells of pines and wet dirt. He knows which places in Hinata’s body he’d like to kiss and hold, where he’d tickle because he thinks he’s soft and tender, where he’d nuzzle at for comfort in a bad day, where he’d press a sweet word and where he’d throw a harsh one.

He knows he broke Hinata's heart when he pushed him away from his life, and in the process he shattered his own, too. He knows that if the accident hadn't happened, he would have probably asked Hinata out, and they could have had that first kiss they weren't able to give each other before he left, and now he would be happier than he has ever imagined of being, and instead of making Hinata miserable, he'd be working his fingers to the bone to make him equally happy.

He knows Hinata damn well, in ways he shouldn’t and in ways he sometimes wishes he didn’t, and yet he pushed him away.

He pushed Hinata away because even knowing Hinata as well as he did, it was so easy to convince himself that all Hinata cared about, all he ever wanted him for, was his tosses.

His left hand clenches into a trembling fist, eyes on the floor since the shame and deceive won’t allow him to look up at him. He knows he doesn’t deserve Hinata. He also knows he’s nothing without him in his life.

He moves the words inside his mouth like they’re candy—the type that’s acid first and sweet later, too hard to crack it with his teeth and big enough to last over a few minutes unless he licks it small—and says, “I’m sorry.”

The acid of those words makes his eyes squint, his mouth close tight. There’s no sweetness to it and no matter how thoroughly he tries to make the confession feel smaller, it still stings and corrodes him, it still burns.

Hinata glances up, surprised. Kageyama’s expression doesn’t help to ease off the bruises between his ribs and all over his heart.

“I know you meant well.”

“Kage-“

“I just-“ he interrupts before the words reach the brakes and he finds himself hiding the truth from Hinata again. “I wanted to be okay, and I wasn’t getting okay. No matter how hard I tried, this thing—” He grabs his right arm with his left hand, sinking in his fingernails so it hurts. “—it wouldn’t get any better.”

Kageyama doesn’t want Hinata’s pity, and as surprisingly as he may find it, there’s no pity on Hinata’s face when his eyes catch sight of him. He doesn’t know what he sees on Hinata’s face, but it’s not pity. Or maybe he does know what he sees on him and doesn’t know how to accept it, doesn’t know how to take the love in Hinata’s eyes, too sure that he doesn’t deserve it or that it’s just his delusion to let himself feel it.

“I wanted to be okay,” he continues, slowly. “I really did. I thought that after a few months going to rehabilitation I’d start to get better, but it never happened. I wanted to be okay for you, and—” He stiffens, the _for you_ echoing in his head, confusing and honest, he knows, but embarrassing nonetheless. “And I couldn’t.”

There’s a force Hinata’s been ignoring for a very long time—maybe entire years—that pleads for him to be closer to Kageyama, to stay by his side a little longer, to make their time together matter more than it should. A force like gravity, as if he were mars and Kageyama was the damn sun, his beckoning too strong to not run and run and run around him, happy and oblivious, forever under an inexplicable spell.

There’s a longing and pining he’s tried to suppress because he didn’t want to be obvious, didn’t want to be intrusive, didn’t want to be loud and honest about it, yet he doesn’t know how to ignore it anymore. He doesn’t know how to suppress the urge, if that’s what he wants at all.

Hinata’s hands find Kageyama’s, fingers pressing all over his palm, fingers, knuckles, wrist…, knowing he can’t heal Kageyama by force of will, neither his hand nor his heart, yet that doesn’t stop him from trying. He searches for something with his fingertips, with his gentle touch, something Kageyama isn’t sure he can offer, something he thinks he lost but still wants to give him—as an apology or as a debt. As a thank you, maybe.

Kageyama’s fingers twitch as he sends the signal to clench his hand into a fist, yet staying static, fossilized, unable to respond. If he could, he’d make his hand close around Hinata’s. He’d press his palm to Hinata’s and intertwine their fingers, then tug. Tug from his hand, tug Hinata in, never let him go. Yet he can’t, and his hand only twitches helplessly, unable to hold on.

“I wanted us to go to nationals together,” he continues—bitter, sober, dejected, “yet you went while I was unconscious. You didn’t need me at all.”

He’s trying so hard to not start sobbing. He hasn’t cried in front of anyone since he was eleven, not even in front of his mother. If it comes down to Hinata, though, there’s no walls, no barriers, no barricade he can protect himself with—there’s only pure, honest emotion, a bunch of feelings he’s able to contain most of the time. Here, in the dark, with Hinata’s hands fondling with his—with his touch heating the way from Kageyama’s skin to his chest—he cannot, nor wants to, contain his emotions anymore. He’s bare and open and Hinata’s there to receive him, he’s sure—Hinata wants nothing more than the truth, and Kageyama wants to gift it to him, even if there’s a tiny, small possibility of losing him for good.

“I wanted to go to nationals with you. I wanted to go to every tournament and win it all. I knew we could do it together.” He sucks his lips into his mouth and bites on them, embarrassed, Hinata’s fingers grazing up the inside of his arm not making it any easier for him to relax. “I wanted to go to the summer camp at the beach. There was a town nearby where they were going to throw fireworks, and I wanted to take you there as a surprise.”

The last words make Hinata stop for a second, looking up from under his locks of hair, not knowing if he’ll be able to face Kageyama without revealing what he’s truly thinking, yet needing to see Kageyama’s face _at all costs_.

“I– I wanted to accept your offer to celebrate New Year’s Eve with you and your family. I wanted to invite you to Gion matsuri this year.” Kageyama knows Hinata is watching him, knows he cannot hide away now, knows he needs all this truth out of his body and for Hinata to judge. “And after the accident I just– It was all gone.”

Hinata’s fingers press harder where they are holding Kageyama, not knowing how to pull him closer without actually invading his personal space, without straight up bracing himself on his torso and holding on as hard as his body could allow.

“You can still do some of those things.”

Kageyama blinks at him. “What?”

“We can go see the fireworks anywhere else, any other time. And you can still ask me to go to Gion matsuri with you.” Hinata blushes slightly, thumbs pressing harder on Kageyama’s hand. “I will say yes.”

He can’t hold Kageyama’s eyes any longer, so he stares at their hands instead, fitting his fingers between Kageyama’s stiff ones, helping his arm to get closer to him.

Kageyama stares at him, agape, thinking that if he were to move one of his muscles, his heart could slip out of his body and crash.

They’re both blushing. It’s the middle of the night and Kageyama has just pulled up a scene in Yachi’s party. It’s so very dark outside, only a lamppost nearby, and he has been ignoring his friends for years, pushing them as further away as he could in hopes they’d come closer. It’s cold, _he’s_ cold, and he doesn’t deserve any forgiveness or comprehension.

“You don’t hate me?” he asks—incredulous, amazed, _thankful_.

Hinata shakes his head. “No. Can’t say I’m not hurt or disappointed.”

Kageyama nods to himself. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

He doesn’t deserve the way Hinata brings his hand closer to his face to press his cheek on its palm, as if Kageyama could cup it or caress it—as if his body could move even if he hadn’t been in an accident, frozen still by the simple warmth of Hinata’s skin.

Kageyama gulps down the acid and the sweet of the stupid hard to swallow candy, squeezes out of his throat, “I’ve missed you.”

Hinata waits a beat, another, looks up momentarily and wraps his arms around Kageyama, burying his face on his chest, holding him between his arms so tightly Kageyama couldn’t escape even if he wanted. “Me too.”

Kageyama wants to reciprocate, wants to hug Hinata back and push his nose into his hair, take in his forgotten smell. “I cannot face anyone in the team lik–“

“You don’t have to,” Hinata rushes to say. “You don’t have to be okay. You don’t have to come back if you don’t want to, or if you can’t, but–“ His head hides on the crook of Kageyama’s neck, fingers curling on his clothes. “But don’t stop being our friend. Just… Don’t do that. Your life isn’t over. You can still do a lot of other things, and we’ll still support you.”

Kageyama knows. He’s known this whole time. There’s a whole universe of opportunities, but he wanted this. He wanted it so much and was so sure he could achieve it that he hadn’t considered having a plan B. He wanted to compete, wanted to be a winner, a genius, an ace, a simple player among others, a wannabe—he wanted to be whoever could stand on the court with Hinata, possibly on the same side of the net, but if he were on the opposite one he’d take that too. He wanted to play, and he wanted Hinata by his side, yet he’s not going to be able to follow his life’s goal anymore. At some point he's going to have to accept his dream is long gone and unreachable for him.

Today is not that day.

“I wish it had run me over,” he squeezes out of his throat, knowing he’s right on the verge of crying, the blunt truth pushing him back to the edge. Even if now he has Hinata there to stop him from falling, he shivers at the thought of how he’d spit his insides out of his body with the collision. “I wish it hadn’t stopped. I’m like this because the driver stopped just late enough. If it hadn’t, then maybe I’d be gone, instead of fucked over like th–“

“ _No, stop_ ,” Hinata pleads him, crying out—breath hitching, fingers clawed at his back. “Stop. Don’t say that, please.”

“But it’s what I-“

“I know,” Hinata interrupts, desperate. “Just– I know you’re hurting, I know it hurts too much, but please don't say that. Please don't even consider– Nothing would be better without you here. Nothing.”

Kageyama clenches his jaw, breathing fast and deep through his nose so it doesn’t run, so he can calm himself and stop the tears before he spills them. “I wanted this so much.”

Hinata nods, trembling. “I know. _I know_. I’m so sorry.”

Kageyama may have to throw his universe away, but he doesn’t have to throw Hinata away. He doesn’t have to leave his friends behind, by any chance. He doesn’t have to turn himself inside out or upside down. He can stay the same, somewhere else, even if the frustration rips him apart, even if it enrages him so much he could dissolve into ash.

Kageyama cannot hold Hinata’s hand with his right one, touch his cheek with it, or wrap both arms around him to pull him closer, but he has another arm, damn. He has another arm, another hand, life isn’t over yet—their connection isn’t, either.

He passes his left arm around Hinata and presses his face against the top of his head, nose smashed against it. Hinata’s hair tickles all over his face—a type of caress he’s been craving without accepting it. He’s finally allowing himself to seek Hinata's body, years after he ripped them apart. 

“I’ve wanted you by my side.”

Hinata squeezes him tighter if that’s possible, wriggling into his touch. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

A shudder opens its way from Kageyama’s spine to the center of his chest, making him blush. He gives in into Hinata’s embrace, forgetting for a brief second about how much he’s hurting and focusing on Hinata’s warmth instead, in what it does to him, in how much he’s missed it. He remembers the time he went for a hug and Hinata for a kiss, how they would have kissed if only Kageyama had read the signals better and if he hadn’t been a coward and moved away instead of closer to him. He thinks of how much he wants to be back in that day and, this time, dip towards Hinata’s face to steal the kiss they yearned for, maybe even two, or three, or more, prevent the accident from happening and from bringing them apart.

Kageyama’s whole body is hurting, if from the cold or the fear, he doesn’t know. He’s hurting, yet Hinata’s touch is so soothing, so tender, everything he’s been longing for and didn’t have the guts to ask for. He doesn’t know how to let him know he needs him there, right fucking there, so close that there’s no space between their bodies, not after the years he’s pushed him away and how he made him think he didn’t want to be his friend anymore.

Hinata is better at words and at professing his emotions than Kageyama will ever be, though. He shows them by the way he holds him, how he nudges closer to his neck and breathes in, tired and somehow content, somehow calm, even in the middle of the raging storm they’re trapped in. He knows how to sweet-talk his way into people’s hearts.

He loves Kageyama this close, knows he can’t have him drift away again no matter what, and ever so tentative, he says, “We will go see the fireworks, okay? And you can come home anytime you want, even if it’s not New Year and we don’t have anything to celebrate. We can go to Gion matsuri together. I want to do all of that with you.”

Kageyama wants it, too. He wanted so many things, so much more than just volley, and he can still have a fist of those. He can have Hinata’s entire world if he allows himself, if he doesn’t chicken out or flee away.

He pushes his nose into Hinata’s hair and takes in a shaky breath, his arm looping faster around Hinata’s shoulders so he cannot pull back and see the ugly, hot tears spilling down his cheeks, even though Kageyama knows he can feel the tremor of his body, the way his chest stutters with each inhale.

It feels as if Hinata holds him for the rest of the night, while Kageyama sobs all the anger and all the pain out. He has whole years of resentment and hatred bubbled up in his body, a passion too big to fit into one single human, and he’s had to carry it all by himself for too many years, for far longer than needed.

Hinata doesn’t say anything—doesn’t even dare to, in case his words made Kageyama shy away—but he presses soothing sounds into Kageyama’s shoulder and neck, rubbing his hands up and down his back, and along his sides and shoulders, even tickling at the back of his neck. Wherever he reaches, Hinata touches, and wherever he touches, Hinata finds a huge crack, a huge scar. Kageyama’s been broken for years—even before the accident he wasn’t his full self—and now that Hinata’s finally allowed to check, now that Kageyama finally accepts his comfort, Hinata can do nothing else but to try and heal him, in any way he can, with all of his ability and will.

After a long, long while—after his breathing has calmed and pure silence has come back—Kageyama unwraps his arm off Hinata and sits back on the bench of the bus stop, exhausted. He rubs at his face, feeling knackered, and maybe a little bit liberated, too. Maybe that’s all he feels. Maybe he’s finally free of the prison he built around himself.

“Shit, sorry,” he mumbles, embarrassed, scraping the dried tears off his face.

“’s okay.”

Kageyama nods to himself, rubbing at his nose. The stickiness of it makes him grimace.

“I’m sorry,” he says one more time, because no matter how many times he’ll say it now or in the future, it will never make up for what he has done to Hinata. It truly won’t. “I mean it.”

Hinata nods. “I know.”

Hinata keeps himself half a step away from Kageyama. Shit, he really wants to be back against his chest, sharing their heat, taking back everything he’s missed.

In an act of impulse, he cups Kageyama’s face, dragging his fingers across his skin and into his hair, thumbs pressing at his cheekbones lovingly. The touch startles Kageyama, who looks up at him with wide eyes and a blush that could potentially be caused by the cold, but is certainly stirred by Hinata’s gesture.

They’re old, now. Older. There’s freckles by Hinata’s cheeks that Kageyama hasn’t met before, and muscles where he couldn’t find them before. Hinata’s probably grown a pair of centimeters since he last saw him. They’ve changed so much—the _future_ is waiting right across them, threatening—yet it feels, for one hopeful moment, as if they’ve come back to that day. That day, when Kageyama thought his life would start, and Hinata had tried to kiss him.

He never wants to leave again.

For a few seconds, they stare at each other, longingly, unblinkingly. Then, Hinata puts his hands away, feeling himself blush, too. “Sorry.”

Kageyama clears his throat, trying to keep his composure. Entire years of missing and yearning are making it difficult to control the urges assaulting his whole body. From his thoughts to his muscles, to his joints and bones and cells, everything Kageyama wants right now is to be closer to Hinata. The feverish dream he used to have in the hospital, when he still thought he’d get better and Hinata was the focus of his days, returns to him with renewed strength.

He wants to be back by the station, standing in front of Hinata, and bend down to kiss him. He wants to kiss him here, in the cold and in silence, alone, and back at the party wherever no one is paying them any attention. He wants to kiss him by Hinata’s front door after a date, by his own house’s before inviting him inside, during a picnic and in the amusement park, in a concert, in the snow, by the beach. And the more he thinks about how he can absolutely not kiss Hinata after the weird night they’ve shared, the more he wants to do it.

For now, he can only take a very tiny step.

“Um, by the way.” He takes out his phone and focuses on it—on anything rather than Hinata’s adorable face. “I changed my number, so. Do you want it?”

This is not a tiny step. It’s practically inexistent, like he hasn’t moved at all. Kageyama feels pathetic for even daring to take it. Hinata probably thinks he’s a stupid ass idiot, but then again, isn’t that what they’ve always thought of each other? He thinks he’ll be fine with it, as long as Hinata doesn’t hate him for everything that’s happened.

When Kageyama looks up to check if he’s messed up or embarrassed himself, his heart clenches pleasingly in his chest.

Hinata is smiling softly at him, with love and tenderness and a certain wetness that makes his pupils so, so very bright, angelical. Kageyama’s so entranced by him that he thinks he stops breathing for a few seconds.

Only after a second after he’s done it, he realizes that Hinata has nodded and, for both of their sakes, his little affirmation opens a road they’re too ready to drive through—a path to patch them up and back together.

With a trembling in his voice that resembles the one of his heart, Hinata says, “Of course.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go (plus an epilogue) and it'll be over!!


End file.
